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@kitredgrave In the US? In the presidential elections when people can bother to vote? About half (55% eligible voter turnout in 2016)
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For what it's worth, 25% of non-voting Americans refused to vote because they were uninterested or unable to stomach a candidate. Using a rough approximation, Democratic-Republican party got 120m votes of 130, which means that ~33% of americans eligible to vote did not have a plausible candidate who could represent them. For any democrats watching, I'm pretty sure that 33% wasn't in the center the party's been chasing since before I was born.
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@tekk I vote in most elections, but I refuse to vote for #twin-parties candidates. Sometimes, that leaves me with no available choices, but the only way to break the duopoly is to refuse to give my vote to them.
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@tekk I heard a talk by Boots Riley from The Coup where he said the US labour movement demobilized during WW2 to support the war effort ...
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@tekk ... and has been effectively dormant as a political force every since, allowing both the major parties to ignore it as irrelevant
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@tekk Dems have had to appeal to the social liberal "new left", so USAmericans came to think of "left" and"liberal" as the same thing
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@tekk ... despite the fact it's possible to be a social liberal and far-right economically ("liberal" in the older European sense)
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@strypey @tekk Labor's lost political force is caused by exactly the same thing that cause the Black community's political force to decline.
They wed themselves to one of the #twin_parties, so that the other party never needed to respond to their concerns (no chance of earning their votes anyway), and then their chosen party realized it had their votes regardless of what it did, so then their chosen party also stopped pursuing policies that would benefit those constituencies.
If they want the parties to pay attention, they need to put their votes in play such that both parties have a shot at getting them.
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@lnxw48a1 @tekk I disagree. IMHO political influence comes from being able to mobilize people in large numbers, not from being a swing voter
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@tekk @lnxw48a1 example? The #NRA. The GOP know they will always have their votes, but they still hold huge influence because they mobilize
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@tekk @lnxw48a1 think of the Charlton Heston "cold dead hands" rally after the Columbine shooting. #NRA lobbyists have teeth; active members
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@tekk @lnxw48a1 when was the last time US labour organisations led anything as challenging of the establishment as the #TeaParty or #Occupy?
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@strypey @tekk How could US labor groups challenge the establishment, when the Democrats are part of that establishment? They would need to be independent of the #twin_parties, then they could challenge the establishment. Surely you've noticed how both #TeaParty and #Occupy lost most of their force once they were co-opted by a party.
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@lnxw48a1 @tekk there's a difference between supporting a party, and submitting to its tactical and messaging discipline, as US labour has
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@tekk @lnxw48a1 ... the #NRA observably support the #GOP, as being most friendly to their cause, but don't submit to its internal discipline
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@tekk @lnxw48a1 ... so the #NRA can extract concessions from the #GOP in a way that the unions haven't been able to with the Dems
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@lnxw48a1 to make sure #GOP do what they want, #NRA regularly flex their organisational muscles; mobilizing their people outside of #GOP
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@lnxw48a1 ... whereas the major #US unions channel their people into the Dem machine, never mobilize politically themselves ...
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@lnxw48a1 ... then wring their hands and wonder why the Dems take them for granted
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@strypey @tekk I expect that #NRA voters don't care what party someone is in, as long as they support their positions on gun rights. If they were wed to a party, they'd have lost their cause years ago, whenever the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House at the same time. Wedding your cause to a single party is a foolish thing for that very reason.
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@strypey @tekk If I'm running for office and I already know your group is going to deliver nearly 100% of the votes it produces into my hands, all I want from your group is higher turnout (which you also want). On the other hand, that other group might deliver enough support to the other side to tip the election that way if I don't give them something they want. What do I have to do to cause them to tip my way?
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@lnxw48a1 @tekk this assumes that the worst thing that can happen to a political party is losing this or that election race. It isn't.
tekk
lnxw48a1
Danyl Strype
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