Yeah there are a lot of “fairweather friends” in politics who won’t feel inclined to return any favors when it matters most. The opposite of that is having a committed constituency that votes enough in elections to not be worth upsetting—aka a base of people power. These take serious effort to create and not all groups are distributed geographically the same way so some have more/easier influence than others. One reason the NRA is so powerful and not abandoned despite negative media coverage is that they have tight relationships with Republican politicians and they turn out big time in any primary where someone opposes them or something they want. It’s not so much about the campaign contributions as far as I can tell (other groups spend far more and are much less influential) though campaign contributions are certainly a part of their system of carrots and sticks.
The lack of more broad participation in primaries is a problem for represenation and responsive good government. It’s an opportunity for groups that aren’t all that representative to magnify their influence. Alaska’s top 4 primary election seems like a step in the right direction since it opens up primaries to more voters and then lets voters rank the top 4 candidates in November. It increases the chances that someone can try to run and win as a more representative candidate instead of being filtered out by small, highly partisan groups.
It’s often easier to stick to established narratives, group identifiers, and allies, or even make up new conspiracies than to be measured and nuanced. Something inflamatory and/or conspiratorial is more likely to hook into human brains, be amplified by engagement seeking algorithms, and, if it’s obscure but rapidly repeated, not have any better sources of information competing with it when people look up its key words.
Yeah there are a lot of “fairweather friends” in politics who won’t feel inclined to return any favors when it matters most. The opposite of that is having a committed constituency that votes enough in elections to not be worth upsetting—aka a base of people power. These take serious effort to create and not all groups are distributed geographically the same way so some have more/easier influence than others. One reason the NRA is so powerful and not abandoned despite negative media coverage is that they have tight relationships with Republican politicians and they turn out big time in any primary where someone opposes them or something they want. It’s not so much about the campaign contributions as far as I can tell (other groups spend far more and are much less influential) though campaign contributions are certainly a part of their system of carrots and sticks.
The lack of more broad participation in primaries is a problem for represenation and responsive good government. It’s an opportunity for groups that aren’t all that representative to magnify their influence. Alaska’s top 4 primary election seems like a step in the right direction since it opens up primaries to more voters and then lets voters rank the top 4 candidates in November. It increases the chances that someone can try to run and win as a more representative candidate instead of being filtered out by small, highly partisan groups.
It’s often easier to stick to established narratives, group identifiers, and allies, or even make up new conspiracies than to be measured and nuanced. Something inflamatory and/or conspiratorial is more likely to hook into human brains, be amplified by engagement seeking algorithms, and, if it’s obscure but rapidly repeated, not have any better sources of information competing with it when people look up its key words.