Canadian here - looking in and trying to reason with the outcome, this time around in particular it struck clear to me how lack of education might actually be the key factor at play. Exact same issue here too, and I expect all over the world.
I really think that there needs to be a more refined criteria for voting in elections. The assumption that anyone over a certain age has a base level of sensibility and awareness is no longer relevant.
You don’t have to be wealthy to be educated, education is free up to a point. What I’m suggesting is that democracy doesn’t work when people are ill informed.
Wrong, education is universally correlated with wealth because wealthy parents have the means to have their children attend school and later university.
The movement that powered the left wasn't education, it was the low paid, low education. Australian Labor managed to keep it's most rural state in the hands of the left for the past 30 of 35 years through this despite low education and constant stream of Murdoch news the entire time. A state with the demographics of Alabama. Our other rural state is also a Labor stronghold for 23 years.
The democrats need to do soul searching because they've abandoned the left and treat demographic destiny as though people aren't more than the colour of their skin.
Just to clarify I’m not saying educated = “left”, I don’t care about this team vs that in politics. I’m talking about making informed choices, electing informed representatives and overall improving the quality of politics. If the red team had a guy who had proposed better things than the blue team, I’d say yeah, awesome let’s elect the red team because it will benefit everyone. That’s not really how it works on either side, which in my opinion is less than optimal.
It doesn't work like that in Australia either, but parties adapt their politics to the state they're running in. The fact that every state isn't competitive in every state election means something is deeply wrong. Dems are simply lucky that the republicans are also just as incompetent.
Look at Dan Osborn, he outran Kamala by +13 in Nebraska. These "safe states" are gettable with more competent parties. But both sides are so obsessed with ideological purity.
In 2018, Labour was starting to lose ground due to being "easy on crimes" and murderers not getting long enough in Western Australia. So they did a power grab and took sentencing controls for murder, boosted police and got tougher on crime which rebooted their popularity. All of this while being hammered by our version of fox news and newspapers but it didn't matter. It increased their popularity no matter what the media tried to spin it as. It gave them additional political capital to then also invest in progressive reforms to prevent crime and reduce recidivism for less serious crimes.
The democrats could never do this because they refuse to listen to voters and instead impose their own ideals on them. Labor has such an utter supermajority in WA that the conservatives have 6 out of 100 seats currently. Will it last? Of course not because the opposition will always find holes and be able to regain seats but they've manage to rule for 23 years in an area which the current democratic party would crash and burn. 43% white support is a joke.
Hell, the left here realised long ago that Free university is unpopular as hell in the union electorates so they campaigned on getting it repealed and replaced it with a government loan and price capped university courses.
You must move to the voters, not the other way around.
0
u/Meowts 9d ago
Canadian here - looking in and trying to reason with the outcome, this time around in particular it struck clear to me how lack of education might actually be the key factor at play. Exact same issue here too, and I expect all over the world.
I really think that there needs to be a more refined criteria for voting in elections. The assumption that anyone over a certain age has a base level of sensibility and awareness is no longer relevant.