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The Kier Starmer approach of staying out of the media and just not being the other guy(s). No positive vision or policy, just "not the other guy".
I wonder if this will become a trend and keep happening on the left the world over?
Starmer previously served as leader of the opposition party. He was not the incumbent. Are American voters really willing to give current Vice President Harris the benefit of the doubt?
When Al Gore ran for President in 2000, he had served as then-President Bill Clinton’s VP. Gore didn’t run away from their record, he embraced it and made it a key aspect of his policy!
(Now that I think about it, there are so many similarities with the 2000 election as with the current one. A formidable third party that could act as a Democrat spoiler. A scandal that makes the incumbent Democrat President a liability to campaign with. Concerns about election integrity. The Republican nominee criticized for lack of ‘presidential’ qualifications. A tech bubble which was at its peak value. Criticism of the Democrat President involving the country in a war in Eastern Europe. Criticism of the President’s handling of evacuating soldiers from a collapsing Muslim country where servicemen ended up dying.)
Who’s the formidable third party? The Libertarians and Greens are a joke as always, and Kennedy endorsed Trump.
Kennedy was polling historically well for a third-party candidate, and he will remain on the ballot in most non-swing states. The nationwide realclearpolitics polling average had him at about five percent, which means 5-7 million votes.
I guess I don’t consider that formidable. Gary Johnson was polling at around 8% in early September of 2016, but he ended up getting only 3.3% of the vote. By the time he dropped out of the race, Kennedy was polling at a measly 3.9%, and he would almost certainly have gotten an even smaller percentage of the vote if he had stayed in until November. In contrast, Ross Perot garnered 8.4% of the vote.
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Notably this was how Anthony Albanese won the 2022 election in Australia - the small target strategy, banking on Scott Morrison's unpopularity after a series of scandals to shift votes over to him.
We live in an age of negative partisanship - "I'm not the other guy" is the dominant strategy on most sides of politics right now.
Australia's kind of a special case because IRV+compulsory voting means that the two big parties wind up very close to each other, so aside from scandals there isn't really that much to go on.
Of course, while Labour did win, their primary vote was historically low and the Greens nibbled away at Brisbane; the tactic worked, but it could easily have left Albanese leading a minority government (and, well, good luck lasting more than one term while also placating the Greens; they've gone bananas).
Yes, compulsory preferential voting means that elections are decided by fighting over the middle, which means that both major parties have strong structural incentives to moderate and focus on the swing voter.
Possibly something like that is what they're up to now - Labor pick a fight with the CFMEU, who are traditionally their allies, on the logic that this will sway centre-right voters, and lefties who flee to the Greens are going to preference Labor above the Coalition anyway, so maybe it will all work out? But given their dismal primary vote, I really doubt Labor can afford a strategy like that for long, especially after the last few years have been disastrous for them both in terms of big symbolic actions (the Voice) and in terms of kitchen table issues (they just don't seem able to beat cost-of-living). I really would not like to be in the Labor party room right now.
The weird bit for me, as a libertarian/alt-lite, is that the outcome I really, really don't want is specifically the election landing in the middle; I do not want a Labour minority government with the Greens, because lol the Greens are now enemies of liberal democracy (they want hate speech laws and to ban a couple of political parties for opposing SJ). Labour majority isn't too bad, and Coalition majority isn't too bad; I just don't want Labour minority.
I can't disagree with that. The Greens have always been fruit loops, but they've gotten significantly crazier lately. The chance of them controlling the balance of power is terrifying.
I used to be a Greens voter, actually; it's only lately that they've lost me (both because I've swung toward conservatism and because they've gotten into SJ). Prior to SJ, and in the 90s/00s when great-power conflict wasn't such a big deal, their big policies amounted to environmentalism (which I mostly agree with), social democracy (which I agree with) and marijuana legalisation (which I agree with, although I've never used it personally). But yeah, wanting to ban opposing parties (even if for now it's only minor ones; come on, we've all read that poem in school) is an immediate "welcome to just above the bottom of my preference list, right above single-issue parties whom I think are pushing the wrong way on that single issue (e.g. the Animal Justice Party, since I oppose animal rights)". I was already pretty cross with them over their peacenik tendencies (they're opposed to our alliance with the USA, basically hoping to let the US do the dying for our freedom in WWIII, and I think that's dishonourable), but wanting to ban opposition parties is "no way, no how, this risks irrevocable harm" territory.
I think I preferenced the Greens once in the mid-2000s, in one of the first elections I voted in, but I went on from that to be a pretty consistent Labor voter, and only over the last few years I am drifting towards the Coalition. The thing is, in the 2000s the Greens genuinely seemed credible - anti-war looked great when Iraq was still going on, environmentalism is a concept that it's easy to have warm and fuzzy feelings around, and their stance on social issues at the time was basically secularism and gay marriage. Of course, I may also have been fooled or just an idiot back then.
Now, though, I feel more aware that they're just, well, kind of nuts. They're currently all-in on Gaza, they're demanding rent and price controls, they're the loudest supporters of the Voice and treaty, they oppose the US alliance, and they suck up to China as well. Pieces like this are pretty eye-opening for me.
I just don't want to let those people anywhere near the levers of power.
*looks into recent Greens actions*
Oh Jesus, what the fuck? I haven't been paying enough attention to domestic politics; we had our own Parliament invasion?! And this China article is a lot crazier than I was crediting them with being; I was talking about this interview years back, where he at least does agree that the PRC is doing terrible things but thinks that talking to them is going to make them stop and implies we want to sit out WWIII. Outright pro-China rhetoric... well, that raises some ugly possibilities, most notably "the Greens may have been bought" and more generally an upward adjustment in P(organised sabotage campaign|Australia joins WWIII).
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