To a certain extent I understand courting the fringes of your party every now and then. But for the life of me I don't understand making that cohort the main goal of your increasingly nuttier and nuttier rhetoric.
What is this electoral calculus?
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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It's actually rather brilliant.
In an (d)effective 2 party system like ours, running to your extremes has few costs, since the electorate tend to vote parties out rather than vote them in. When the public tires of the ruling party (it helps if you own most of the media) and you do get elected, it's by:
- your base that votes for you regardless
- new voters from the fringe you've been courting
- people who've convinced themselves that you're just pretending to be crazy to court that fringe.
Now you can do whatever you like and if people complain they get shouted down by both sides: "What did you expect? They literally told you they were going to do this."
In short, it's how you drag the Overton Window toward that extreme. If only the Left in this country had figured this out years ago, we wouldn't be saddled with Sir Red Tory.
Sounds just the sort of thing a tory leader would say.
This guy is on fire today: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8dmq88j6rro
Sort of deploying the Royal Navy to sink every small boat they can find in the channel, I’m struggling to see how he would stop the boats (tm) in weeks.
Maybe they do. Maybe they can see that we tanked our own supply of doctors, nurses, fruit pickers, tradesmen, etc etc and are coming to help out.
You should be glad we raped, plundered, murdered, and enslaved you!
Imagine if someone in government said this about Japan and Korea, Manchuria, etc. (and this is something that some far-right Japanese groups believe and say and is met with predictable reprehension domestically and abroad).