"Americans talk about politics all the time"

I was talking to someone from the UK who commented that politics isn't a big deal over there, while Americans seem to be discussing it constantly. This may seem odd to anyone who doesn't live here. My understanding is that in the UK, campaigning is limited to six weeks before an election. That tends to limit discussion as there's nothing to discuss most of the time.

Here, campaigning is almost continuous as we are always in the leadup to an election. The presidential election was a little over a year ago, in November 2024, and now we're deep in midterm season. The midterms, which determine control of Congress, will be in November of this year, and campaigning has been underway for months as the first primaries were yesterday.

If you're wondering what a "primary" is, those are the elections where voters choose their party's nominees for the general election in November. This is normal for Americans, but sounds batshit crazy to everyone else. Most Americans aren't aware that in other countries where elections are held, they don't have primaries because voters trust their party leadership to pick the nominees. The US is one of the few, maybe the only country where voters don't trust their leaders to do that, so we have this interminable primary season. This requires candidates to first run against everyone in their own party who wants the job before they even face their opponent in the other party. This makes no sense in other countries where, if you're, say, Labor or Tory or whatever, you assume that whoever the party bigwigs pick as the nominee will at least represent the party's values, so whoever the specific person is doesn't really matter much.

The upshot of the American system is that after a bitter primary battle, half of a party's voters will hate their own party's nominee because they wanted the other guy. In 2008, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were duking it out for the Democratic nomination, after Obama won the primaries, some Clinton supporters refused to support him, calling themselves PUMAs (Party Unity My Ass). The same thing happened in 2016 when embittered Bernie Sanders supporters refused to vote for Clinton and even voted for Trump.

In 2024 when Joe Biden dropped out after the first debate and Kamala Harris was nominated at the convention, many people complained that she hadn't won a single primary vote, without realizing that this would have been normal in most other countries, and was even normal in the US up through the 1960s when candidates were chosen at their party's conventions, with the voters only having a say in the general election.

So all year we will be subjected to campaigning, and traditionally, once the primaries are over, the 2028 presidential campaigns will begin. So of course we discuss politics a lot here since it's always campaign season.

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dancingtongue · 80-89, M

Its not just the short election cycles. It didn't use to be this way. We had a two-party system, but once the election was over the campaigning largely stopped and those elected came together to find mutual interests, areas of compromise in order to govern. The two parties were that not far apart, so it wasn't that big a challenge. Then Cable TV, Talk Radio and shortly after the advent of social media began pushing ideologies to the two extremes, driving the gap wider and wider between the parties because conflict sells (just look at any social media algorithm) and it became year round campaign cycles because it sold.

Meahwhile, back at the ranch, critical thinking was becoming extinct and the few places where it was still taught have been targeted by those who don't have the foggiest idea what it means.

Theyitis · 36-40, M

@dancingtongue It’s a common talking point that American politics is increasingly polarized and that the left has gotten more liberal and the right more conservative lately; however, while that may have happened a little bit, the much bigger change in politics is not the parties getting more extreme, it’s that the parties are much better sorted than they used to be. There used to be liberal and conservative Democrats and liberal and conservative Republicans, and split ticket voting was much more common. Now the Democrats are the party of the liberals and the Republicans are the party of conservatives; furthermore, it used to be that most Americans had some mixture of liberal and conservative views on the issues, but now liberals are liberal on almost everything and likewise conservatives are conservative on almost everything. So the two parties are not that much farther apart than they used to be 30 or 50 or even 70 years ago, it’s just that they have much less in common, which makes people from opposite parties more mistrustful of each other and leads to less civility.

Handfull1 · 61-69, F

@Theyitis I think one man is responsible for much of this. He promotes division every chance he gets. Get the people to turn on each other. I think many still have mixed feelings on policies but too afraid to admit it.

dancingtongue · 80-89, M

@Theyitis I would agree that the parties are better "sorted", as you put it. Regrettably, they also have gamed the electoral system where it is practically impossible for other parties to gain any traction on the ballots, in debates, in the media although the majority of voters now declare themselves as independent, or do not declare, and polling on issues tends towards the big gray area between extreme right and extreme left. The middle where the two parties used to reside. And for that, I largely blame the changes in media -- and the extremes exploiting it -- as I stated. But then I was trained and educated as an objective journalist, spent half-a-century in it or working with it, and deplore what has happened to a once noble profession.