August thoughts

Well the first part of the general election has started and its obviously too early normally to predict but its pretty clear that the majority of Americans will come to the conclusion that the Republican candidate is way over the line on almost everything and while he is certainly entertaining, hes no President and leader of the free world.  While of course odd things do happen this isn't really worth much discussion.

What is worth discussion is why he has so many backers.  In fact, we seem to have developed a fragmented society and while the Republicans have captured the main group of people who feel America is doing badly (it isn't based on any factual data you look at) they are not limited to just the right.

I think this is worthy of some exploration just to flesh it out.

The first thing that I should note is that there were always single issue voters, voters who felt so strongly about a particular issue that they would support whoever was on their side, not matter what else they espoused.  The biggest of these issues involve things like abortions, guns, gay rights, discrimination.  Israel is one of these issues but there isn't a notable difference on either side.

So someone who is anti-abortion and who considers it murders will support a candidate even if all their other policies are not what they want.  Of course they would prefer an anti-abortion candidate who also has other positions they support, but faced with a choice between two candidates they will vote for the one that is anti-abortion since they feel so strongly about it.  Everything else can wait until they fix that one big issue.

So this has developed into the respective bases of the two major parties although it also to some extent maintains certain third parties.  While not everybody is fanatical in this group, picking a party because it is pro life or pro gun or pro (fill in the blank) probably means that any candidate you nominate will get up to 30% of the nation's votes, on both sides.  You can't normally persuade these voters to change sides without alienating your own base.

It is also clear that issues within each party can be at conflict with each other.  You have your Tea Party Republicans and your Occupy Wall Street Democrats that oppose what were major party platforms related to business and the economy.  They have both moved their respective parties away from the middle and made compromise almost impossible.  The bottom line though is that while they have tremendous influence in primaries they become a liability during general elections where the independent middle gets to decide.  So candidates have to appeal to those voters effectively betraying the fanatics who do in fact feel betrayed.  Of course democracy means the will of the many outweighs the will of the few and what is perceived as betrayal is simply the way the process has to work.  Is it rigged?  Well rigged by the nature of democracy where the winner gets the most votes.

I'll continue this meandering train of thought later in the week,