Politics

To go even farther for things people care about, how much? For me universal health care and education along with robust social safety nets available to all are big issues. Same with general civil rights for all. Now like gun control im for but I view it as a local issue and am unwilling to trade anything for it or like going out and protesting about it. Im not really willing to trade to eliminate the death penalty either although its something I am for (for the elimination of) but maybe I might march for it. Right to die a bit higher on my list but again im more concerned with the living although right to die is about that to some degree. There is this wierd left must go fully left and right must be fully right. You see it in peoples comments with dems. Litmus test on what they must be left wise but its actually a centerist party that should be more left of center than they are rather than just left of republicans.

They had me until they used an LLM to analyze the data

This is why IRV and other systems that allow for more then 2 parties are important.

I know for me, neither party represents me very well.

Great post and clearly explains the appeal of politicians like Mamdani which have shocked the conventional political leaders. Despite being left of conventional US politics, Mamdani appeals to these non-aligned voters by speaking to the real issues they care about, and importantly, they don't care about his more left stances. This means there is no need to do things like abandon the defense of trans people, Palestinians, etc. to appeal to the center.

However, I think this does raise some important questions for how this winning political coalition (left+nonaligned) can govern. These voters don't have the knowledge or interest to develop concrete policy preferences--they care about attention to their economic issues first, but they also expect results later. This is why this group embraced but later rejected Trump and Biden. And it's why our country seems to be caught in this policy yo-yo between incompatible visions of America. Because the non-ideological voters aren't getting what they need, so the only thing they can do in the next election is throw the bastards out.

So, if a party can actually deliver lasting economic benefits to these voters, they might be able to forge a relatively long-lasting political rule. But how to do this is less clear because the economy is hard to manage and not directly under the control of political leaders. Things are too gridlocked to push through radical changes that have a chance of really improving things, and policies that are small enough to be passed won't have a big enough effect to mollify people who want prices to go down. I predict Mamdani, despite running a brilliant campaign will fail to overcome this problem.