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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

It's a "prediction" on the scale of how many months in advance I said Bernie Sanders was not going to be the next President of the United States. It's within the laws of physics for me to be wrong, but not a practical real world scenario here nonetheless.

Only 35 Senators are up for reelection this year, I assume you meant the House, not "all of Congress". (Note that all of the House is up for reelection every election term, and it doesn't change very quickly anyways.)

Most sane people will not hinge their vote on Internet politics. Things like healthcare, their views on whether or not killing babies is okay, if it's totally cool to be racist in 2018 or not, etc. will tend to take precedence. As those things should, because those things affect people's lives, not Google and Netflix's bandwidth bills.

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>sane people will not hinge their vote on Internet politics. Things like healthcare, their views on whether or not killing babies is okay, if it's totally cool to be racist in 2018 or not, etc. will tend to take precedence. As those things should, because those things affect people's lives, not Google and Netflix's bandwidth bills.

Fortunately I can vote for all that by simply not supporting a single party in the US and voting for the other one. As far as I know there is no major party in the US that supports killing babies.

> but not a practical real world scenario here nonetheless.

That is the kind of thinking that entrenches the status quo.

Close political fights are worth fighting because there's nothing to be gained by preemptively surrendering.

> Only 35 Senators are up for reelection this year, I assume you meant the House, not "all of Congress". (Note that all of the House is up for reelection every election term, and it doesn't change very quickly anyways.)

Yes, I meant the House. Noted and corrected. The Senate already passed the needed bill, so we're past that hurdle. The Republican caucus is vulnerable next election, many of the gerrymanders probably won't hold and they know it.

> Most sane people will not hinge their vote on Internet politics.

Single issue voters make policy.

> Single issue voters make policy.

Most often, and most significantly, unintentionally, on all the issues they aren't considering when voting.

Because, actually, the policy makers they elect make policy, and and that's true whether or not the one election a single issue voter tips is enough to shift the national balance on the issue of concern.

Or whether the candidate elected on your one issue even bothers voting the way you expect on it, rather than abandoning it.

Single issue voters often don't stick with it long enough for policy makers to worry about betraying them after an election where they issue moves a small but (for reasons particular to the context of that election) decisive segment of the electorate, or if they are sticky then representatives have a strong incentive to keep them onboard with an image that victory is just over the horizon, to hold on to their vote without resolving their issue so as to enable all the other policies the representative is concerned about.

Single issue voters, if they are a large enough group that can organize themselves effectively, can have an extraordinary impact on American politics. Look at the NRA.

Yes, they won't have as much sway on the issues they aren't campaigning for, but that's a necessary consequence of voting on a single issue.

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