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We should have elections with no candidates.
(sh.itjust.works)
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
So what you're asking for is the party politic talking points they already publish and never actually vote for? We already have a party that says one thing and have voted consistently against their entire published position for a good 40+ years. I don't see much changing there.
I think a better solution is to hold politicians feet to the fire. When they have debates play the clip of them from a rally stating they want to X horrible thing or where they just negated their previous statement. "You claim to he for a working wage but lets play the clip from CSPAN where you are against increasing minimum wage and call people working in fast food 'lazy and dumb'".
Unfortunately a huge portion of voters dont care about actual facts and vote purely by ideology or religious views or are easily swept up in the propaganda l. We should be outlawing ads that are obvious false statements or try and bend the situation to look drastically different.
I'm asking for the individual candidates to lay out their specific political goals. The party can continue to publish its platform and planks.
Then people vote based on whether they want to see those goals met. When those politicians are up for re-election, it's fairly easy for someone to tabulate whether or not those goals were met. If there are extenuating circumstances (overwhelming opposition, for example), then they can use that to defend themselves. This would help hold their feet to the fire.
As for voting ideologically, I attribute that mostly to FPTP - people feel as though they cannot do anything but vote ideologically because there are no real alternatives. That's why RCV is extremely important.
Oddly it seems like little to no Republican voters recognize that Trump never passed anything of substance. They also seem to not understand how the economy actually works, see that during a booming economy Trump ran up one of the largest deficits. Trump sought to get rid of major safety nets which lower and middle class tend to use the most and tend to also be the redest counties.
If you tabulate up all the pros and cons for the Republican candiate, aside from normalizing hate, all of the perceived benefits are just voters not paying attention in their civics classes in highschool. I don't think expecting voters to actually do their due diligence really works.
You're not wrong. We have a representative democracy because the Founders thought the same way. I guess I prefer not to believe that it's impossible for people to be well-informed enough to make a good decision on these things. I've certainly seen some new lows in the past 10 years.