There was a long period in American history when elections were waged on economic issues powerful enough to define the two major parties and divide the public. These issues stemmed from Americans' deepest hopes and fears, and had the power to cement their loyalty to a party and draw them to the polls.
As the economic issue weakened, a large set of less comprehensive issues emerged. Civil rights, street crime, school prayer, and welfare dependency were among the earliest of these issues, which were followed by others including abortion, the environment, education, and global trade. All were important, but they intersected with each other in confounding ways. And none had the reach or the endurance of the economic issue. The emergence of the so called religious right have changed this somewhat, as religious conservatives may completely base their Presidential votes based one two issues, and two issues alone....abortion rights and gay marriages.
During any given election cycle, there is a myriad of small to medium sized issues being debated, but the issues were too crosscutting and too numerous for either party to combine them in a way that could easily satisfy a following.
By the 1970s, self-described independents accounted for a third of the electorate. People also found it increasingly difficult to think and talk about the parties. Americans were better educated than they had been in the 1950s, but they had a harder time saying what the parties represented. In the 1950s, less than one in ten had nothing to say when asked in polls what they liked and disliked about the parties. By the 1970s, three in ten had nothing to say. This has brought on a large spectrum of platforms and beliefs in the republican party alone, from the Religious conservatives at the far right, to the moderate conservatives at the left of their party. In order to attract the support necessary for election (and more and more, that means independent voters), it is very common for a candidate to soften, or abandon their core principles altogether and go running to the political center. No more proof of this is needed than the creation of the term "flip flop," which is widely bandied about in today's media.
Americans who today have a party loyalty and an awareness of the parties have a voting rate more than twice that of those who call themselves independents and who cannot find words with which to describe the parties. The change in party politics helps to explain why, disproportionately, the decline in participation has been concentrated among Americans of low income. Although a class bias in turnout has been a persistent feature of U.S. elections, the gap has widened to a chasm. The voting rate among those at the bottom of the income ladder is only half that of those at the top. And as their willingness to actually vote recedes, so does their political power, thus politicians today need only pay a momentary lip service to the issues which are crippling them, and resulting in a feeling of despair, and a lack of hope.
The change in party politics also helps to explain why candidates now have trouble crafting messages that voters find compelling. Candidates have never had so many communication weapons at their disposal, yet they have never found it so hard to frame their message. Campaign messages today are strikingly different in the wide range of issues they address, the contradictions they contain, the speed with which they turn over, and the small percentage of voters with whom they resonate. But how do you craft a platform and message, let alone a public perception of a candidate given the 30 second demands of today's media availability, and the anemic attention span and political tolerance of the American electorate?
Today's quick sound byte mentality also feeds the very poison that infects American politics today, the propagation of half-truths and lies in order to frame a public opinion of a candidate, no matter how untrue or factually baseless it may prove to be. Witness the complete failure of the Obama campaign to dispel the rumors surrounding him up to today that he is a practicing Muslim.
And, as this political culture we have so skillfully crafted over the course of the last five generations perpetuates itself, more and more voters will abandon the political party system, feel increasingly more disenfranchised from the system, which will perpetuate in lower and lower turnout.
It has been statistically proven that the changing demographic of the American voters is such that we may have only 6 or 7 additional Presidential primaries in which the majorities are comprised of whites. Needless to say, any future hopes of either party for a sustainable future depends entirely on the recruiting and including of minority members, and the Democrats have perennially succeeded to do so.
However, will this changing demographic so radically alter each party that we may be heading towards a three or four party system such as in Great Britain? I hope so. For as with diversity comes an inability of the two major parties to dominate, and in fact, drown out any hopes of a tertiary party's hope for mainstream attention by the media, as now demonstrated by our public debating process.
Now more than at any time in our history, we need to reexamine our entire political process, and the manner in which we elect our representatives at every level. And that means media communication, the electoral college, the manner in which we register new voters, right down to the process we use to cast votes. We simply cannot go any longer with a disinterested, apathetic electorate, which will almost certainly be a breeding ground for political corruption, lies, and half-truths. This is more than a call to correct our political process, it is a call to cure the symptoms that may adversely change our democratic system itself, if you care.
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