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Other way around: if a politician doesn't care about you and people like you, you have little incentive to care about them beyond avoiding a greater evil.
It's the job of a politician to earn votes, not the job of voters to enable complacency and corruption.
While it's of course best when everyone votes and I've never missed a chance myself, I can kinda understand why a lot of people don't feel up for waiting in line for hours just to cast a vote for "not the complete monster"
While I understand the complaints, I completely disagree with your argument. We are not ruled top-down, but bottom-up. They can vote third party if they choose, but if they do not vote at all, then no, a politician should not be expected to try to convince them otherwise. The politician has no guarantee that they actually can become engaged, and it is fully reasonable to expect them to try to secure the votes of people that actually are engaged. It's just how the incentive structure is logically set up, an already safe bet is more likely to win than a risky one.
Bullshit. 90%+ of all federal level politicians are much more likely to pass a bill or support an initiative if the richest and most powerful 10% but nobody else supports it than if it has majority support in the broader population. That's the DEFINITION of top-down
That kind of attitude is exactly what caused the current situation where there's a right wing to far right party, a literal fascist party, and at most a dozen or two center left politicians in all of Washington.
Nor do the people have any guarantee that the politician is worth waiting in November weather for several hours.
If you hired a plumber who did nothing about your clogged toilet, would you celebrate not hiring the other plumber who would have broken your pipes and kicked your dog?
Politics is work and voters are customers, NOT employees.
In other words, the miserable status quo that benefits the already rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else.
If you completely ignore any possibility of a politician enticing voters by promising and doing good things, sure. That's a pathetically meek mentality that enables corruption and bad performances, though.
Except the only reason those donors have that power is due to our campaign finance laws, which only exist because republicans in the SC allowed infinite money into politics with Citizens United. If we had far greater voter turnout, this would have been impossible, as that puts dems in power and they do not believe in unlimited money in politics. Will play by those rules once those rules are made, though.
The idea that the US should never become fascist is a value, likely one that you and I share. It is not some high law though. If voting voters want fascism, then fascism is what we should get. It is our responsibility as voters to prevent this.
No, voters are absolutely not customers. We are 100% employees of the greater political sphere. From regular every day voters, to volunteers running polling places and campaigns, to people standing up to run for office. It's all, 100% on us. We cannot simply shirk our duty, otherwise our democracy will change, as was intended by the framers.
It's the people that do not vote that enable all the corruption. Not the people that go out and make themselves heard.