politics

It's election day. Time to exercise your democratic rights Australia.

Horticulturalist. Environmental hand wringer. Open source enthusiast. 

mfer #9187

is it really a right tho if it's compulsory

Working on /impact ||


Abundance Economy book: book.abundance.id

I guess you can choose to pay the fine or write in a nonsense vote... so I'd still classify it as a democratic right personally.

Web monetization.  Working on gfam.live to help creators earn from their content.

"you have a right to break the law" is my favorite kind of right

lol

There are pluses and minuses. Compulsory voting pushes politics towards the center because instead of having to "get out your base" everyone gets out by default. So instead of politics getting more extreme and polarized to motivate people to vote, you have the opposite; parties seek to alienate as few potential voters as possible by being as mild mannered and centrist as possible.

So our equivalent of Trump, Clive Palmer, is a marginal figure who spent 120 million dollars to win a single seat last election. The flipside is that our major parties are somewhat cowardly and afraid of bold reform  which is becoming a problem with issues like housing, energy and tax.

I don't know if politicians can rely too much on these "structural" advantages to prevent extremism in politics.

Trump had everything going *against* him on paper (outspend 2:1 in some background states, criminal cases, hostile media, etc) and he still won.

At the end of the day politicians need to be effective and be able to "sell" their policies to the electorate.

If they think "the system" (how elections are structured, demographics, etc ) will let them get away with incompetence and unpopular policies, they're just inviting more extreme politics to take hold.

In the US, you can say that roughly a third voted for Trump, a third voted for Harris and a third didn't vote at all (I think Trump won the popular vote by less than 2%) - since a third sits out, politicians and parties have to motivate their base.

In Australia, for the major parties they're really just trying to not be the worst option since everyone has to vote... so they tend to shy away for anything polarizing.

The thing with US elections is that the margins between Republicans and Democrats is razor-thin... it can often be thousands or hundreds of votes  that can decide crucial seats and with the Electoral Collage that can make all the difference. 

I personally don't think Trump won on policy, as evidenced by voters who are now hurt by tariffs or deportations that they didn't think they were voting for (despite Trump being very clear about both).  

I genuinely do think Trump was able to get over the line because of the Podcasters (JRE, Impaulsive, etc) inspired young men (a traditionally low voting group) to go vote. 

Happy to agree to disagree though, I'm sure there are lots of variables to consider here.

I don't disagree with this reasoning.

But I'd argue that Trump could pursue the same exact policies without the polarizing rhetoric. He uses polarizing rhetoric bc it's super effective in the US media environment (helps him dominate the news cycle & get earned media)

If the US had compulsory voting he could have made that work to his advantage also (by promising to end compulsory voting, for example).

So my point is that there is no substitute to an effective government that can sell its policies to the public. Everything else is just tactical maneuvering