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shminux comments on A Voting Puzzle, Some Political Science, and a Nerd Failure Mode - Less Wrong
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There's the possibility that staking out a position too close to the mode (but not close enough to take those votes) will alienate a significant bloc of voters who will punish you by voting for someone else, or not at all. There's a threshold for a lot of voters where it doesn't matter that you're the "best available" candidate - for them it's like being asked to choose between a fatal dose of cyanide and one of arsenic. The fact that you're going to get one or the other is no incentive for complicity.
In reality the median-voter theorem sometimes works, sometimes doesn't work, and sometimes works partially. Reality is complicated and has a lot of extraneous forces and factors which are abstracted away in models. It's easy to construct plausible scenarios where the best strategies would be very very different.