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ChristianKl comments on The "best" mathematically-informed topics? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I trust people who are actually successful at politics over people sitting in academia when it comes to explaining me how politics works.
As far as the ability to do the math of the field goes, when I was a kid I did the d'hondt calculation to get the amount of seats particular election results would produce while being at a election party and most of the people with public offices at the party had never run d'hondt.
OK, props to you for working through a mathematical model of an election. But I find your criticism about the ability of elected officials to be wanting: Do you expect your plumber to well-versed in the mathematics of hydrodynamics?
The point is that elected officials are the experts at politics. If they have no use for knowing the math, then the math is not central.
The campaigns of candidates employ political consultants many of whom are statisticians of the Nate Silver kind. All high-level campaigns do a lot of data mining and analysis.
I don't deny that there's polling and trying to predict the effect of political messaging based on statistical models.
On the other hand running a campaign and doing public policy are two different things.
*I would also note that I don't live in the US but in Germany, and we don't have exactly the same political system.
So you're criticizing Capla's interest in models of electoral dynamics because politicians don't do it. That misses the point: electoral dynamics are mathematically explicable. They don't cause electoral outcomes, so an in-depth understanding of them is of limited value to candidates themselves. But trusting the explanations of the politicians as to why they won an election is a genuinely terrible approach to understanding anything but the politician's own beliefs.