@highame
This could be a major error. I was going to vote Lib Dem at the last election. Never done that before, always voted Labour. However, suddenly their utterly stupid wokeness ended up with me spoiling my ballot and a lot of people I know did the same thing or voted Conservative.
Do political parties know anything about the electorate? Lots of voters in the US will be despairing of Trump but when it comes to their daughters, that's a different ball game. Women will re-think their votes. I just really, really don't get it. Trump will just use this to inflame division.
I've been doing a lot of research and thinking about this issue because it is getting to the point, in the UK, where the schism between the electorate and the establishment is now so wide, it is going to have very far reaching political and cultural consequences.
I think one of the main problems in Britain is that a lot of political representatives, be they MPs or local councillors, don't have any ongoing exposure to the daily reality of their constituency or ward. They didn't grow up there or go to school there. They don't actually live there or, if they do, they haven't lived there long. They don't know the people very well.
So all they have is their surgeries and their postbag. Now there seems to be a perspective that the issues that are raised in their surgeries are "outlier issues", or specific to one particular case -- and that everyone else is perfectly fine.
Activists have figured this out and are using it to their advantage. So an MP or councillor might receive a hundred negative emails about, say, renovating a piece of parkland and then presumes the community is against it, when, in truth, everyone else wants the project to go ahead -- they just haven't contacted the MP or councillor to tell them so.
I think this is what leads to the odd priorities we are seeing. Coupled with Twitter silos, many MPs and councillors are now chasing policies that the vast majority of people find either bizarre or alarming, and they are not tackling issues that the majority of people in an area really find concerning.
It is one reason why I have real problems with parachuting candidates into constituencies or the idea of abolishing the local connection qualifier.
Ideally, I'd like to abolish party political candidates all together and have elections that elected an "independent" constituency representative based on prior community representative work that then, through a constituency referendum, sat in the chamber according to the results. So you don't elect the Labour candidate or Tory candidate, you elect a candidate and then tell him where to sit.
All Tory returns would mean a candidate joined the Conservative group. All Labour returns would mean a candidate joined the Labour group. 50/50 would mean a candidate joined a central group. And I'd quite like to get rid of whips, but that would mean the flow of legislation would slow down exponentially, but that might not be a bad thing considering the amount of bad and unexamined law that is being passed.
If things don't change, and fast, I can see the US fracturing and certain states ceding from the union. In the UK, if the LibDems and Labour continue down this road, I can see the necessity for a new political party.
Otherwise, you gonna end up with massive political, social and cultural discontent.