Scrollable video is killing the Dems in general, not just because of Israel. It's like all the worst of local news crime reporting on steroids.
In the UK, for example, Reform has been consistently polling the same as the Conservatives and Labour added together., and all three of those added together only represent 2/3 of the electorate. In the US, that translates to 2/3 of people becoming non-voters.
Why that might look like a rightward shift in the US is because the Republicans don't fix their primaries (since the 90s), and their voters actually have an effect on who gets picked to run. Why it won't actually be a rightward shift is because Republicans ignore their platforms after being elected, and don't mind getting thrown out at the end of a term or two to work at the businesses they helped while in office.
Democrats simply don't believe in any sort of democracy anymore. They invest all their effort into yelling at black people and Hispanics, and raising as much money as they can from the worst people in the world. The rest of the time they spend attacking anybody running to the left of them as racist or Russian, while their media outlets simply ignore those people other than when they're helping promote the slander. That's whats pushing away "ethnic voting."
As a black person, I know when the voting season is here because I see a bunch of paid Democrats running around calling black people who criticize their party ethnic slurs and using the word "massa" a lot. Republicans don't do that. They don't rely on black people so just ignore us. Democrats rely on us, but will never do anything for us, so they use terror.
Secondly, we employ "adversarial" systems for two branches of government (legislative and judicial) because it's a hell of a lot easier to spot flaws in ideas of people you are opposed to (as opposed to some European Judiciaries that have "inquisitorial" systems, where a judge investigates activity)
Very often in the proportional systems people opine that "grand coalitions" should form, with the two largest parties, although that loses a lot of the advantages of the adversarial system, and has a tendency to steam roll smaller interests in the country.
Finally, the Greeks pointed out that governance within societies cycles through a series of styles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory
The USA itself has gone through SIX iterations of how parties should look https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_system#United_States
Instead, democracy was determined to be selecting public officials by random lots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
I guess it's a bit like the jury system.
I read an article not long ago on here about how promotions in companies should also be done by lottery in order to break up cabals.
No amount of spending will get you a democrat senator in Texas, for instance.
For that matter there is an Australian billionaire whose "investment" also does not appear to have worked in his favour [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Wisconsin_Supreme_Court_e...
There are other ways for money to impact politics beyond individual general elections. As well as funding community organizing and creating long-term propaganda, it's much easier to impact ballot initiatives (paid signature gathering works, for example, where paid canvassers don't.)
Money won't get you a Democratic senator in Texas, but it makes you 100x more likely to get you a Republican lawyer than an average Republican.
The issue with the lottery is the need to ensure that the candidates both want the role, and are capable of doing it.
The latter, who is the right person to say "X is unqualified because.. " (and the Peter Principle suggests that just because someone was good at a lower job, eventually they're going to be put into a job they are unqualified for)
The theory with the current style that the person who puts themselves forward most definitely desires to win the job, and, as they rise up through their party system, have some level of competence, as adjudged by the people they have convinced to put them forward as a candidate.
Further, the adversarial nature is supposed to then mean that that person's opponents can call out the reasons that that person isn't suitable for the job.
Unfortunately, this ends up being a muck raking exercise, and the complaints might not amount to anything more than innuendo, further, there's no guarantee that they will even be heard (the supporters will provide evidence that the opponents themselves are not qualified to make any criticism)
Unfortunately a lot of elections these days, US or otherwise, tend not to end up being "This candidate is awesome, let's vote them in", but, instead "the incumbent is terrible, get someone, anyone, to replace them" - in the US Biden was voted in because Trump 1.0 was deemed a failure, and then Trump 2.0 was voted in because Biden was deemed a failure. Right now the Democrats appear to be on the rise again because Trump 2.0 and the Republicans are being deemed a failure. This isn't to diminish the wins by some actually good candidates though (although how good they are remains to be seen, and is a matter of... opinion).
if that would be the case, why is the adversarial system not working in its current practice?
Also, i think the difference between the judicial systems of parlementary/european and the american system have more to do with the difference between civil and common law.
European goverments are really the legacy of the revolutionary french idea's of a civic state, in which citizens have duties to the state, and have rights being garantueed by the state. The state itself is being granted the authority to do this by its citizens through some process.
I have to ask if you understand that "being easier" is not a guarantee of anything other than... wait for it...
It being easier.
They let voters express their preferences, and leave building the coalitions up to the politicians. Instead of expecting voters to understand that their preferences are expressed during the primaries, and the general election is just to pick which coalition wins.
It is crazy that no one in America is promoting a Constitutional amendment to fix the basic governance.
I think these are somewhat orthogonal.
Either way, majoritarian elections are a plague and must be avoided as much as possible.
There's absolutely nothing new about parties having internal divisions. Even the fact that at the moment everything is so partisan is nothing new, history has shown that several times over the past century that politics has followed a penudulum that swings from partisan extremes, back to centrist moderates, and then back to the extremes.
I think what's killing Dems is that they don't understand the medium. Mamdani did really well by making good social media posts. Him and Trump had a grand old time at the whitehouse because they have a competent grasp on social media in common. Newsom has been trolling lately and his approval ratings are only going up.
Dems being a million years old is killing the dems.
Generally agree, but
> Him and Trump had a grand old time at the whitehouse
Yeah, but that wasn't entirely positively received, despite his earlier social media success. Him buddying up with Trump was a huuuuge turn off for me.
> Newsom has been trolling lately and his approval ratings are only going up.
Newsom's content is also a huge turn off for me, and I am not convinced that his supposed approval ratings are not simply more CTR type machinations from the DNC. Maybe there's some segment of the population that genuinely wants whatever the hell Newsom is pushing content-wise, I certainly don't have #s on my side. Mamdani's efforts - Trump buddying aside - were much better.
> Dems being a million years old is killing the dems.
Yes, but I think age is simply a proxy for a number of other highly correlated behaviors and positions. Most progressives can name a couple of >70yo dems for whom these complaints do not apply.
Unfortunately, the young Dems with the biggest fundraising rolodexes are usually the ones supported by the fundraising apparatus that already exists.
I think it is structural about the medium because it elevates the profile of relatively rare things like crime or ‘wokeness gone amok’ that dems are losing on. Similarly, with regards to ICE, it is helping dems by also raising the profile of rare incidents. But on net I think this sort of coverage hurts dems more than it helps.
It isn't like the left was doing well in rural America before social media: people in the urban cores just didn't know what was going on there, and they didn't know what was going on the urban cores. But when I was growing up, people thought Bill Clinton was a communist in league with Castro.