Monkey vs Ice Cream

  This is the situation with politics in my state.

So we got one party. For the sake of not really getting into the quagmire of real-life political issues, we'll call them the Monkey Party.

We have another party, and for the same reason, we'll call the Ice Cream Party.

Every election cycle, one party tries to offer the state a monkey. The other party tries to offer the state some ice cream.

During Primary Season, we usually get the following options.

1. A very angry monkey with a rusty knife that screams a lot and does a lot of rehearsed monkey dances.
2. Another monkey who is basically that first monkey, but does even more extreme monkey dances.
3. A monkey who is in a dress and has on a polite monkey diaper. This monkey screams, but often the screams are charming. But once you look deeper, you find out this monkey comes from a very destructive movement that wishes to infect everyone with monkeypox.
4. A monkey. Yes, still a monkey, but wearing a polite monkey diaper and a little hat. This monkey has a knife, but it's a pocket knife and kept in a cute little case.

If you don't get to vote in the Monkey Party Primary, you look at the monkey selection and just hope that those who do vote in it have the sense to choose Monkey 4 as their monkey.

They do not.

In the end, they'll select whatever of the other three monkeys screamed the loudest and did the best dance.

The Ice Cream Party offers up bowls of ice cream.

During the primary, you often get choices like the following.

1. A massive sundae with several different scoops of ice cream, toppings, cherries, whipped cream, and little cakes that are delightfully absorbing the ice cream as it melts to create an even better sweet treat.
2. An ice cream and candy blended treat with lots of large chunks of whatever it was blended with.
3. An old-fashioned ice cream float that may not have the level of toppings but still looks pretty great.
4. A scoop of vanilla in a paper cup.

This primary will go one of two ways.

There is about a 30% chance that 1-3 will win.
There is a 70% chance that 4 will win because everyone will decide that 4 is the safest option because toppings, blends, and being too old-fashioned might cost them votes.

When the Ice Cream Party loses (and they almost always do), if they chose 1-3, they will blame the loss on them selecting the ice cream that was too intense for everyone. If they selected 4, they'll blame it on vanilla being too bland to excite people enough to vote.

If it's a major election year, we might get half of our registered voters to actually vote. On an off year, that percentage greatly reduces.

If we had 10 people who could vote for either We Eat Ice Cream or We Get An Angry Monkey with a Knife, basically this is how it goes.

Five of those ten people do not select a monkey or ice cream.
They sit there.
Three people will vote for the monkey, in fact, scream with the monkey, do the dance with the monkey, and put flags of the monkey in the back of their truck.
One person will vote for ice cream.
The other person could vote for ice cream OR for the monkey, but it doesn't even matter because those five people who didn't vote for anything basically ensured that we got a monkey with a knife.

So yeah. Yay. Go democracy.