Neither party might go as far as you want, but it is also a mistake to think both parties are completely identical in their views of this sort of behavior.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa...
I would guess that "Do you oppose government data collection?" would get different answers than "Would you support government data collection at the border in order to try to curtail illegal immigration and terrorism?" which is how this administration will likely defend this.
My first comment on the issue was a question and my second one was prefixed with "I would guess...". I don't know how you can read either of those comments and assume that I am stating anything definitive.
They wouldn’t lose voters with ‘extreme’ ideals because, if they decided to not vote, parties would counteract by moving towards the new center, which would be further removed from the ideals of those voters abstaining from voting.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa....
Motivating people with ‘extreme’ opinions from one side of the spectrum to vote moves the center, so it can make both parties move in that direction.
Let’s (in a very simplistic model) say we have 100 voters on a 1 to 100 scale, so centered around 50.5.
If, normally, the extremes of 1 to 10 and 91 to 100 don’t vote, the center stays at 50.5. Convince the 1 to 10 people to vote, and the center moves to 45.5, so the two major parties move in that direction, too.
There’s an assumption here that most politicians are willing to, somewhat, go against their beliefs in order to get elected. I think that’s true, and unavoidable in a two-party system (which, in turn, is hard to avoid in a system with “winner takes all” elections), but if it weren’t, parties can easily replace candidates that object to a course change with others that either have different ideals or are willing to sacrifice some of that a bit in exchange for their career.
This is the opposite of what we’re seeing on the right. Centrist republicans have been pushed out of the party for not being conservative enough over the last 4 years, and primary candidates go out of their way to outdo each other in terms of conservative positioning.
Nobody seriously running on the right is trying to be a moderate Republican on the federal level because being a “RINO” is political suicide.
This theory requires either ignoring that voters may have a threshold at which they become disaffected or ignoring that political opinion may not be unimodal; if you consider both of those factors, that strategy ceases to be dominant.
In the real world, voters can become disaffected and abstain, and political opinion is often not unimodal (in the US it's closer to bimodal.)