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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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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.