I think that’s true too. It works as a cycle; playing to insensible people turns the sensible ones away, and with them gone the candidates are free to pay still more attention to the insensible ones. And it will keep working so long as how insane a politician is doesn’t affect their electability.
Well, it seemed to me like you were saying the changes in private sector jobs were just complementary to changes in public sector jobs here:
Since Republicans are presumably not the ones who prefer the public sector, that wouldn’t explain why private sector jobs would grow more under Democrats, but I’m not sure what else you might have meant by it. If it was supposed to purely subjunctive, it sure wasn’t obvious to me.
Charts like that aren’t meant to find all the root causes of the data, but to consider whether something might have an impact on it. By simplifying they strongly suggest some things are correlated with who is in office, for which an easy explanation is that the policies affect them.
That’s not a rigorous proof or anything, but I haven’t seen anything better. So far you’ve told me there is no such impact, but so far the only justification has been that reality is complex and that data is simplified. Well, that’s true, but it doesn’t provide any real evidence the correlations we do see are fake.
I say assuming there are no differences to be found here is just one more way of looking at party flags and ignoring what they actually do. So let me ask you this: if it turned out it did matter who was voted into office, if one party was actually associated with more job creation or lower deficits or so on than the other, how would you determine that?
