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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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God. Electoral reform is my literal single issue. I don’t care if you are a convicted baby-eater, I’ll vote for you if you make it a campaign issue.

Now, if only anyone at our local level was actually interested in the subject…

reform how, and what's the value you see, if you don't mind me asking?

I think my phone ate a beautiful appeal to the national character, so…

Approval or ranked choice voting. Best chance to supersede existing partisan lines. Also improves skin in game. Downsides insignificant. Parties have no reason to adopt, so I will signal-boost as a local issue.

I think something to keep in mind here is that right leaning people (and to a lesser extent moderates) may now have a fear of anything related to updating election procedure because at this point they've had years and years of "lets make this common sense change that everyone can clearly agree on and has no downsides and absolutely does not privilege the Ds at the cost of the Rs" messaging.

This immune response can be pretty severe between all of the COVID related changes, calls for electoral college updates (and perhaps also fears about D's importing new voters).

It has the potential to pretty significantly hamper otherwise good ideas.

You might as well say registered Dems have been trained to think “voter suppression” when they hear “reform”, because that’s the messaging around ID requirements. Gerrymandering too, though it hasn’t been in the news as much.

In practice, yeah, the establishment would probably jump on all of these to discourage anyone from making the change. All the more reason to push local first.

Yeah not criticizing your approach or interests, I just have the suspicion that you might get confusingly aggressive pushback or skepticism (including on here) because of these events.