The fact is in the 2022 US election, voter turn out was as low as 40% in some states and never anywhere even remotely in the same vicinity as Australian elections (which are well over 90% and a lot of the people who didn’t vote had an acceptable reason, such as living in another country without being a citizen there).
When you have elections being won by very slim margins, which has been the case lately in both countries, that makes a huge difference.
This changes the effect of negative campaigning (people still show up in Aus vs the US), but the idea is to dissuade people from voting for someone, rather than encourage them to vote for you. This might have a positive effect on votes for the party doing the negative campaigning, but I think it’s a poor definition of convincing someone to vote for you.
These are not contradictory at all.
People have to vote, and its easier to convince someone to NOT vote for the hated enemy, which implicitly gets them to vote for you.
You, being aware that there are more choices that Labor vs Liberal, are more educated than the vast majority of my family (and dare I say the community at large), who believe that voting for anyone else is “throwing their vote away”.
I don’t think this is necessarily true, did you miss the massive amounts of negative campaigning that happens every election?
The fact is in the 2022 US election, voter turn out was as low as 40% in some states and never anywhere even remotely in the same vicinity as Australian elections (which are well over 90% and a lot of the people who didn’t vote had an acceptable reason, such as living in another country without being a citizen there).
When you have elections being won by very slim margins, which has been the case lately in both countries, that makes a huge difference.
This changes the effect of negative campaigning (people still show up in Aus vs the US), but the idea is to dissuade people from voting for someone, rather than encourage them to vote for you. This might have a positive effect on votes for the party doing the negative campaigning, but I think it’s a poor definition of convincing someone to vote for you.
These are not contradictory at all.
People have to vote, and its easier to convince someone to NOT vote for the hated enemy, which implicitly gets them to vote for you.
I don’t think this is a useful definition of voting for
Seems to only be true if you think of there being only 2 parties, which is why I don’t think the definition is good.
You, being aware that there are more choices that Labor vs Liberal, are more educated than the vast majority of my family (and dare I say the community at large), who believe that voting for anyone else is “throwing their vote away”.
American politics infects Australian politics in many ways sadly.