Quoting Russell Coker (russell@coker.com.au):
It started out as a Koch funded thing but then took on a life of it's own. I think the Koch brothers are smart enough to realise that it stopped doing useful things for them a long time ago.
They are extremely odd people. I heard discussion on public radio, recently, of a biographical book about that family, and they had some intrigues worthy of the Italian Renaissance. And some good reasons for turning out a bit warped. I listened to that and thanked my lucky stars for having grown up among overwhelmingly sane and pleasant people. I'll gladly take your word for it about there no longer being a Koch sponsorship of Tea Party nutters. I really wouldn't know. In fact, I really ought, in all honesty and modesty, to make something clear: Much as I'd like to explain everything that's puzzling about the United States of America to my esteemed international friends, all too often, I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley scratching my head and saying 'WTF?' too. Because I was only born here, and have that passport. I was raised in the British school system for key parts of my early life (in Hong Kong), and then returned to California just in time to see my native country's culture mutated weirdly by the late '60, then by Richard M. Nixon, then by Watergate, then by the Oil Crisis and Jimmy Carter, then by that mouth-breather Ronald Reagan. The Bill Clinton years I almost caught up with change and I started to feel less like a cultural anthropologist in a strange land -- just in time for George W. Bush and whacko time again. I'm a liberal whose cultural touchstone is his parents' culture, that of WWII, so I'm totally an outsider to political conservatives and especially modern ones, and to Tea Partiers, birthers, preppers, Sovereign Citizens, and other political loons. I'm a secular person raised by an atheist Mum and an agnostic Dad, so I'm totally an outsider to anyone deeply religious, let alone fundamentalists, Mormons, and various even weirder things. I'm deeply oriented towards books and traditional magazines and study of history, so I'm totally an outsider to cultures that get their worldviews from Twitter, Facebook, and reality television, and who don't really read. I'm Scandinavian, so I'm totally an outsider to flag-waving lunatic hyperpatriotism and Texas-style boasting. I'm the product of an Ivy League college, so I'm totally an outsider to anyone so incredibly ignorant as to take Trump seriously. I'm a Californian and city boy, so I'm totally an outsider to the Bible Belt, Utah, Oklahoma, and other places where you need to set your clocks back 50 years upon entering the state. I'm an internationalist, so I'm totally an outsider to xenophobic and isolationist American exceptionalism. I'm a person who defines politics as 'the public's business' and the government as 'us', so I'm totally an outsider to the infantile cult of dismissing politics as inherently evil and working solely to throw out the bastards with no Plan B, and want to shrink government until it's small enough to drown in a bathtub (as evil genius and Tea Party strategist Grover Norquist says). I'm a devoted voter who fanatically seized onto the right to vote when the USA lowered its age of majority to 18 just before my 18th birthday in 1976, so, I'm totally an outsider to the politically disaffected who seldom bother to participate. I'm a straight, white, aging male privileged homeowner who nonetheless is an avid political ally of immigrants, youth, the poor, the LGBTQ, and all kinds of other mutants, so I'm totally an outsider to those who fear change and think Bad People are ruining the USA. I'm a basically peaceful person who thinks civilised people fight using attorneys if absolutely necessary, so I'm totally an outsider to both firearms worship and the recurring urge to invade other countries. So, in short, what I'm saying is, don't expect me to necessarily be able to explain Americans to you, let alone head-scratching Americana, just because I am one. I'm just _here_. Whether I'm _of_ here is debatable. Certainly I'm of a _part_ of here, though I'm also of Hong Kong, of Norway, of the UK, and many other places. And many American subcultures are totally, deeply, wrenchingly alien to me. Just so you know. [reporting about US electoral news:]
Wow, it's even worse than I thought!
My standards are perhaps unreasonably high. School didn't do a _great_ job of teaching me civics, not to mention that I was in the British school system part of when some of it was being taught. So, I read. I studied. I thought things through. And I compare the results of study to what the press writes about who's 'winning', and who has 'momentum', and treating a state's electoral results as winner-take-all when they just aren't -- and find that lacking. Newspapers have sadly been underfunding and underusing their remaining _real_ reporters, is part of the problem. Also, it's the desire for instant news 'material' rather than waiting for sensible analysis. And reliance on bloggers. Shockingly, erosion in the public schools is also having its effect. During the Dubya years, a trend towards teaching strictly towards tests became common. Schools started being evaluated, teachers rewarded or punished, school budgets rewarded or eviscerated, based on how well or badly their students did on standardised tests at graduation. The inevitable consequence of this was that music teaching went away, arts teaching shrivelled, many things -- including civics. Civics! Good God! And all the time, I've been saying and voting 'No, no, a thousand times no! Go the _other_ way!' [follow FiveThirtyEight:]
Everyone seems to say that!
I swear one of the most enjoyable things I've seen in ages was Dubya's political Svengali Karl Rove's live television appearance on Faux News (excuse me, 'Fox News') during coverage of the 2012 general election, the night Obama was re-elected. Rove was on there saying right up through the final minutes that weird Mormon Republican Mitt Romney was a shoo-in for success. Of _course_ he was winning. Why, it was seconds away. All the dominoes were falling as planned, he explained. Cruel reality had other plans, and Rove had an extended on-screen meltdown, as his neat predictions utterly failed, and nothing went right. He freaked out. It was glorious. And everything happened precisely as FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver predicted. I'm sure the Rove meltdown is on YouTube for your schadenfreude enjoyment. [California 'top two primary':]
Let's imagine a case where you have 2 Democrats and 2 Republicans in a CA primary. Each person who's loyal to one of those parties would vote for their candidate who seems best to them (extremist or not depending on preference). Each unaffiliated voter gets to choose between the less extreme candidates of the 2 parties. Each of the parties would probably get half the unaffiliated voters which gives the party loyalists a 2:1 advantage over independents. As most people are loyal to one of the big parties I think it will be uncommon for that to change election results.
I don't know what to tell you, but it really does seem to moderate the hopefuls' positions. And that really was the idea.
One of the problems with the US system is that as voting is optional candidates need to attract voters to the polling booths not convince voters that they are a better (or less awful) candidate than the other contenders. Extreme positions can apparently work to get voter turnout and I think that the CA primaries will have the same problem.
Low turnout is a complicating factor in many US elections. Yes, one of the really annoying thing I've seen repeatedly over a long life as a voter is the tactical trolling of the public, just before an election, by finding emotional 'wedge' issues to attempt to whip up single-issue potential voters and 'swing' voters. 'Swing' is a euphemism for dumbass, more or less, i.e., a low-information voter who's easily swayed and might not vote at all unless stimulated in the limbic system by overheated manipulative agitprop. You'd think people would learn, but there I go expecting rationality and sober reflection again. There is also a problem of voter exhaustion. California has the trait of a wildly overdeveloped initiative legislation system. In any given statewide election, there might be a dozen proposed bits of initiative ordinary legislation (and also initiative amendments to the state constitution) and referendums that have been referred directly to the voters. Starting in the 1980s, the ballot grew by leaps and bounds, partly because the Legislature in Sacramento suffered deadlock between conservative and liberal factions, ergo it was seen as necessary to punt many matters to the voters. (Redistricting reform and the top two primary have started to heal this breach.) Sometimes, I think California is utterly election-mad. Note all of these elected offices I'm called upon to vote for: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/household.html (Scroll down to subhead 'Elected-office political districts'.) That's a _whole_ lot of things to vote for. Because I consider politics the public's business, I take it quite seriously, and research diligently before each election. But imagine all that on ballots, _plus_ initiative statutes, constitutional amendments, and referendums. Doing this right takes a _lot_ of time, and concentration, and patience.[1] [my explanation of regional party biases in parts of California and statewide, with attention to 'safe seats':]
How many of them get in excess of 66% voting for one party?
I'm going to disappoint you on this, and say I don't have figures. I'm sure you can find them, though.
Those bloc voters aren't the world's smartest people. Anyone who thinks that sci-fi should only feature worlds run by straight white men really doesn't get what sci-fi is about.
They are also some of the world's most whiny people.
True, that. [1] Coming up in November is a California initiative statute to completely legalise marijuana, another body blow to Nixon's War on Drugs that I traditionally refer to as the War on Some Drugs -- or as the War on Drugs Lacking Major Corporate Sponsorship. By the way, it's going to pass. Can't wait for the lovely political fallout from that. And as part of understanding American politics, please see this piece to appreciate just how evil and twisted Nixon was in launching that misbegotten crusade: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ (Though, it should be noted, the cited and now-famous comment by Nixon aide Ehrlichman is disputed by some scholars of the period, e.g.: http://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11325750/nixon-war-on-drugs )