This article is a few months old now, but I think itās an incredibly important area of research and something that explains a lot of why America is like it is and how red states stay red.
Excerpt,
A study I co-authored with fellow researcher Kevin Morris, published in December in the American Political Science Review, finds that traffic stops by police stops in Hillsborough County reduced voter turnout in 2014, 2016, and 2018 federal elections.
Our study compared the voter turnout of Hillsborough motorists who were stopped by police shortly before and after each election. Drawing on information about each personās turnout in past cycles, we found that these stops reduced the likelihood that a stopped individual turned out to vote by 1.8 percentage points on average. The effect held when accounting for characteristics like race, gender, party affiliation, past turnout, and prior traffic stops to improve our comparisons. The discouraging effect of stops was slightly higher in 2014 and 2018.
These results make clear that the collateral consequences of policingāincluding worsening outcomes for economic security, educational attainment, and healthāalso extend to political participation. If the communities who are most frequently subjected to policing are also discouraged from voting as a result, it could create a vicious feedback loop of political withdrawal.
Why would traffic stops make people less likely to show up to the polls? Past research has already established that the most disruptive forms of criminal legal contact, like arrest and incarceration, discourage people from voting. Our study shows that low-level police contact matters in the same way. If a traffic stop makes a motorist fear that the government will harm them, it can prompt a withdrawal from civic life that political scientists call āstrategic retreat.ā Motorists might worry that a routine traffic stop could escalate into police violence, a more common outcome for Black people in particular. Beyond justified fears of violent victimization, voters might also bristle at the perception of being targeted to raise revenue through excessive ticketing. Accordingly, if incarceration āteachesā would-be voters that their government is an alienating and harmful force in their lives, traffic stops could catalyze a similar form of ālearning.ā
Full study is available here, and hereās an archived thread from a dumb website where one of the research study authors answered questions.
Yes but one party is actively trying to kill the otherās members and when they run out of them, theyāll go for the plebs that supported them. Whataboutism like your statement is what got America (and the UK for that matter) to the dire point both countries are in.
This isnāt whataboutism. Whataboutism doesnāt acknowledge that one is better. Whataboutism says āB may be evil, but A is just as evilā.
Guess what I did? I acknowledged one was better.
Iām just saying not to be satisfied with a liberal status quo - liberalism will become conservatism when left unchallenged, just like it is already doing. Iām saying we should constantly push for more. Vote as far left as you can, of course, but donāt let yourself think that the āleft choiceā is actually left.
What youāre doing is the mirror image of whataboutism. Pointing out that A is marginally better than B, and thus concluding that the now-suddenly-binary choice has a clear good and evil.
Also, I didnāt mention any parties.