I don’t know what’s going to happen, but focusing on what you’re saying this early is only going to cause you panic when we need to be gathering our strength. We’ve seen from the MAGA movement that our democracy is fragile. The safeguards and protections that make everything "so difficult"tm to change these past decades aren’t necessarily that difficult after all.
I can see a few well established Dem’s like Bernie and AOC jumping aboard a progressive party movement disguised as a blue wave much like was overtaken on the right. We see that there is room to capture voters that didn’t turn out and from both parties, a small band CAN take over a movement if their dedicated enough.
It’s just unfortunate that it was someone on the right who first abandoned party-lined politics and showed you can tame a party while speaking to the base (again, it was only like 20% of the population). It really makes me think that Bernie should’ve handled the fiasco in Nevada and South Carolina differently during the 2016 primaries. No blame to him, and I’m not sure what lesson there is to be learned besides authoritarianism and narcissistic tendencies are a way to brute force yourself into politics. But, I would’ve loved to see Bernie politely take the gloves off and took it to the people to back him up as well like Trump did with his group (just not, you know, all murdery and dark).
I used to be more lenient, but it’s 2024 and people running for elected political offices with ZERO online presence just pisses me off. I know this is gonna blow everyone’s mind, but a large percentage of voters wait till the day before election to research any candidates, sometimes for less than an hour before giving up. It’s probably why most of them don’t fill out information so a voter just chooses them and they’re less likely to dissuade someone if they don’t say anything, at least it might’ve worked in the past.
It needs to be a required special-credit for highschool graduation to fully research and demonstrate you know the candidates on the ballet for your local election and register to vote. This could be bi-partisan, get everyone involved. It doesn’t take fully re-working a shafted education system to get more engaged voters.
I’m just kinda miffed by the whole situation with Oregon, first the drug re-criminalization and now a RCV vote just got squashed. Can’t wait to hear about everything that went down like with Alaska and Maine.