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Even with the demotivation caused by gerrymandering, the 2020 only election broke about 5:4 in favor of Republicans. In the 2022 midterms, it was 2:1, but only 3:2 when you take out the two districts where the Republican was unopposed.
A huge part of America's problem right now comes from worshipping "Constitutional Democracy v2.0" when many other countries are running version 4 or 5.
First Past the Post, no ranked choice voting, an imbalanced legislature, an Electoral College based on the numbers from that legislature, and contemplating no constitutional role for parties, all that has ossified the political culture. You get parties locking in temporary gains and pushing advantages to the hilt because after all there's no parties in MUH CONSTITUTION. Even if we assume the remaining 9% of voters in SC are all embarrassed republicans, that's still 5:4, like the presidential numbers tend to break. In what fucking world should that result in a 6:1 ratio in the house delegation?
I get that maybe you have to consider letting some people be a bit overrepresented to get them to buy-in, that's at the heart of many federal systems, but the degree and the manner in the US has become full-on toxic.
I wonder to what extent this is driving polarisation. I've been thinking a lot recently about what it would take to be able to break bread with someone who was very right wing politically. I see a lot of right wing people who I have a lot of common ground with, if I recognise that the material conditions they're living under are making them desperate for an alternative. Ofc, I'm not keen on the fact that many of them believe that people like me (queer, leftists at universities) are to blame for those material conditions, but I like to imagine a world where we could work on the same team against the things that are actually to blame.
I think the gerrymandering in the US probably makes it so that each party has less reason to court voters of the other side. I can imagine what it must feel like to be a republican in a super blue state — even if you do vote, it won't matter, and then every choice the elected government makes would perpetuate this idea of the big bad "other". I wonder how much this affects things though, given that the polarisation is driven by many complex factors
Well, it certainly doesn't help, and to your point, it means there are fewer incentives to overcome it, whatever is driving it.
One of the issues specifically related to your conundrum is that First Past the Post (and I'm speaking pretty generously here and trying to keep a lid on my cynicism) requires that the parties make appeals to very different constituencies in advance, and try to cobble together coalitions that are at least not ideologically ludicrous bedfellows. Serious policy debates do happen in America, but they happen before there is an elected voice advocating for them (which causes its own problems, looking at you, Dems relying on Roe v. Wade to keep the issue settled).
If there are conflicts within your big tent, you have to either accept the cognitive dissonance and hang together to avoid hanging separately, or you simply shout over and over that there's no cognitive dissonance at all, and all these things are part of a cohesive single platform, possibly divinely inspired. Both parties engage in both strategies, though I daresay the Republicans have skewed quite far to the latter, and as their natural power base has aged they've invited people into the tent whom they were previously content to ignore or at least quietly take for granted.
When you declare loudly that all your issues are important, they tend to seep between interest groups, because after all, relatively few people are truly single-issue voters. You can end up with, for example, people who may have little sympathy for LGBTQ+ rights, but no particularly strong animus, actively leaning into opposition they should barely care about, because it is part of "being a Republican," even though what they really fear is the economic anxiety of stagnant wages and perceived inefficient use of government resources, which leads them to think they'd be better off paying less in taxes. Wouldn't it be less bad if they could be part of a right-leaning party with less strident social views who would vote for (unwise, IMHO) tax breaks for the rich but not against gay marriage?
No ranked choice voting, however, means third-party votes are either meaningless or dangerous to your preferred out of the two practical options, and that has the linked effects of directly discouraging your voting for them in general elections, and encouraging the two big parties to find or create or imagine such serious differences between themsleves that anything that helps the other would be disastrous. There are people who, not without some merit, blame Ross Perot for Bush Sr.'s loss to Clinton or blame Ralph Nader for Gore's loss to Bush Jr. in Florida. The system is a mess. People should be allowed to vote for whoever they want without feeling like doing so will result in their worst possible option winning out. Shit, that's basically what I'm dealing with this cycle. I'm personally comfortable enough with the Biden platform, given the realpolitik of the US, to vote for him again, but I'm not enthusiastic about supporting him. Still, I'm more passionate than ever that it's the right choice; I'd be a hell of a lot more understanding of people staying home or voting for other candidates if it were Mitt Romney or John McCain on the other side, rather than Donald fucking Trump.
I don’t believe that there are still non-fascist republicans. If the party leader tries to violently overthrow an election and then they nominate the same guy and he does well in the polls and you still don’t want to change your vote then you are definitely a fascist. And you don’t have to dig to deep to see that republican policies are anti working class and that the party only survives by catering to single issue voters.
I hate to break it to you, but there is not a world where you can work on the same team unless they change.
that didn't happen so you can start treating them like individuals again.