Misuse Case
In the wake of their loss in #Election2024 the #Democrats are considering a shift to the right - and not for the first time.
But they would have done that if they’d won, too, using the strategy they were pursuing - trying to turn out older, wealthier, whiter, more conservative voters.
…BUT NOT FOR THE REASON YOU PROBABLY THINK.
Political parties in a nominal democracy go where the votes are, or where they perceive the votes to be.
https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/downs.htm
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Misuse Case
The Democratic Socialists of America circa 2016-2023 understood this and it was fundamental to their whole strategy: creating a bloc of left-leaning voters who could get American political parties (at least one of them anyway) to sit up and take notice.
Unfortunately DSA was mostly dismantled by entryists who don’t believe in electoralism. That’s another story.
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/quit-dsa-gaza-israel/
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Misuse Case
But, IMO, that’s thinking of electoral participation as a form of consumerism, which is fundamentally wrong. (The source I linked does this, kind of, but only to make an analogy).
Electoral participation is about creating a voting bloc or even a movement that votes reliably - then getting parties and candidates to move towards *you*. That’s how it actually works.
That’s part of what unions, religious groups, etc. do.
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Misuse Case
Voter suppression is part of it but nonvoters (people who are eligible to vote but don’t) decline to vote for all kinds of reasons which for the most part have little if anything to do with whether they are subject to voter suppression.
You might think, parties should market themselves to voters, and they should try and turn out new voters or infrequent voters rather than just change their strategy and platforms to attract people who are voting anyway.
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Misuse Case
(My apologies for the bad formatting of the linked page, I can’t fix it since I don’t control it.)
The upshot of the linked piece is: parties don’t actually stake out positions and then wait for aligned voters to come to them. They shift towards the “likely voters” who consistently show up to the polls.
In America that’s older, wealthier, and whiter people, who currently tend more conservative.
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