Technically, Republicans are not necessarily "half the votes", more like "a third of the votes" which are then joined by another 10-15% of "unfaithful" swing voters - whose opinions don't necessarily overlap 100% with core conservative principles.

Participation rates can also be very low, particularly at local/state level, making that core of strongly-conservative votes actually pretty small in absolute terms.

You can quickly judge the actual opinion of the overwhelming majority of voters on completely abolishing welfare provisions, when you mention a few magic words that happen to extend those provisions to "normies" (medicare etc).

BTW: Indie voters are roughly 45 percent.

The two major parties share the partisan vote.

This means Republicans are actually a quarter of us along with Dems.

Party line voting is not the only game in town. Roughly half the nation wants to vote FOR something, not AGAINST "the bad guys"

BTW: Indie voters typically strongly align on one or other side of the partisan divide despite their self-assigned labels. The nature of the two-party system is it binarizes the entire discourse and ends up reproducing the bipartisan dynamics by restricting and chopping up the Overton window according to the two major lines of thought. For more true independence you'll need proportional representation and multiple parties. The problem would (does) still exist but across a wider spectrum of opinion.

Indeed. Significant numbers of indies will no-vote and cite what we are discussing here as part of why too.

"Unfaithful"

I used to hold that view, but the fact is the vast majority of those voters ask this question and declare themselves independents while asking:

Vote for what?

They want to know what politicians will do to earn those votes.

What you call unfaithful is actually a direct failure to garner votes.

And that means speaking with people, not at or to them.

It means actually asking for those votes too. Go and watch some politicians and in particular the one who lost to Trump. There is almost no ask and a whole lot of speaking at or to people not with them.

The unfaithful ignore voter shaming, again something I used to do:

A no vote is a yes vote for the enemy

Unfaithful voters cannot be counted on. Think it through: a politician who knows they have votes no matter what has very little incentive to work for those votes...

Today I do not judge others for their votes.

Our future is in the votes to be cast and why we might think about casting those votes.

And I do not blame or shame anyone either.

It is on those of us running for office to get out there, talk with the people, garner those votes and then act on them.

Calm down, it's just a technical term when talking about voter behaviour - the "faithfuls" being voters extremely unlikely to ever change their preference (regardless of what it is). It's a fact of life that many voters have "for life" preferences.

I was calm. Just doing a bit of framing in the hope of improving an otherwise solid discussion.

The optics on that term warrant the framing for reasons already given.

Sidenote: one of the most difficult aspects of threaded text dialog is a very high degree of intent ambiguity is ever present. Same goes for overall emotional perception.

Because of this, I avoid personal judgment and very frequently avoid the top responses to "things one may feel compelled to respond to", which are righteous indignation and subject change.

Much better to assume a friendly dialog, give benefit of the doubt and see where it all may lead.

If nothing else, flat out asking about other people state is often better than declaring it out of hand.