this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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You have it backwards: going after the natural voters of the other side in a two-party system is the riskiest thing you can do because the other party has a massive advantage with those voters which is an historical track record of telling them what they want to hear and them voting for it - rightwingers trust them on Rightwing subjects and are used to voting for them.
Even if (and it's a massive massive if) a party succeeds at it once due to the party on the other side having deviated too much from its traditional ideology, all it takes for the party on the other side is to "get back to its roots" to recover most of those lost votes and subsequently win, whilst meanwhile the leftmost party that moved to the right has created for itself an obstacle in their own "going back to its roots" in the form of a section of the electorate which feels they were betrayed.
Sure, they'll eventually get it back if they themselves quickly "go back to their roots", but it will take several electoral cycles.
Further, if that gap remains too long on the Left even in a two party system it would create room for a third to grow, starting by local elections, then places like Congress, then Senate and eventually even the Presidency.
One of of the key ways in which First Past The Post maintains a Power-Duopoly is because growing a party enough to challenge the rest in multiple electoral circles takes time and the duopoly parties will try to stop it (generally by changing back their policies to appeal to the core voters of that new Party).
The US itself once had the Whig Party as one of the power duopoly parties and that exists no more.
The Democrats abandoning the Left is not a stable configuration for them and carries both the risk that the Rightwing electorate sees them as fake and the Leftwing electorate feels betrayed, and now they're stuck in the middle with a reduced vote.
You're saying if a party strays too far that another party can steal some of its voters, the party can "return to its roots" and get all those voters back.
You're also saying if a party strays too far it can't just "return to its roots" and get those voters back because they don't trust them.
You are contradicting yourself. If Republicans suddenly become a rational party they'll be trusted by rational people as much as if Democrats suddenly became a leftist party.
You're also telling yourself: there's no reason for the Democrats to move left because you're not going to trust them anyway. If Kamala came out tomorrow and promised everything you were wanting to say you wouldn't believe her or vote for her.
The fact is Republicans are going full Fascist, and there are people with conservative ideologies who don't want fascism. That is why they will vote for a Democratic Party shifting to the right instead of the "original right wing party".
Sure, creating a vacuum on the left increases the viability of a third party, but that's not going to be viable this election so they don't have to worry about it.