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I think it’s the opposite. Very low turnout means voters are largely happy with the government and don’t think it’s worth spending a few hours voting.
High turnout means you have two groups with broad disagreement that you care deeply about. It gets me to vote. In my view the left is completely insane and the right has some (not all) good policy. If I were in Europe it would be even more important as I think those countries are dying thru immigration.
I'm reporting on how it's perceived by the establishment politicians, and they're usually pretty clear that high turnout = good. Likewise, the establishment media will usually report negatively about record low turnouts and positively vice versa (unless the wrong parties are being voted for, but OP takes care not to do that).
Do the politicians who won actually care about low turnout? The losing candidates and liberal media in my neck of the woods always complain about low voter turnout after every election, but I’ve never gotten the impression that the winners mind in the slightest.
In the short term, no, but in the longer term a low turnout means increased risk in the next election, which drives prioritization and strategy.
The nature of low turnout is that the lower it is, the less stable it is for the incumbent, because ever-smaller groups of interested voters can be decisive in upturning it if they either switch or even just re-enter the voting ranks next election. As voter participation can be volatile, this means that it's relatively easy for sudden surges of voter engagement to turn against an incumbent. As a result, politicians would rather win with low engagement than lose, but what they really want is higher voter turnout of their base, to be more resilient, and a failure of turnout on their end means- even if victorious this time- that things need to change.
Personally, I'd consider this an advantage of voluntary over mandatory voting systems. In mandatory voting systems, there's considerably less volatility as there's a lot less sway in overriding existing factionalism / voter commitment to past votes. (People are less likely to vote against something / someone they've already voted for, and such.) While whether volatility is itself good or bad is questionable, in my view it's an important part of being able to actually challenge incumbents, and incumbents have enough built-in advantages that challenges to them on irregular voter sentiment sways is a good thing.
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