politics

The apathy is directly tied to the DNC pushing conservative and moderate policies instead of progressive ones. When voters see so little difference between the two parties, where neither party is promising the policies they're looking for, then they see no point in showing up at the polls.

I wish they would prioritize that. It is a bit of a chicken and egg problem currently. Instead we're losing voter protections from a corrupt SCOTUS, so it is becoming harder to vote overall.

Gay marriage, the ACA, the Ledbetter act, more would be better, but they aren't doing nothing.

American's support "progressive" policy when it's not framed as a political question.

That article you linked to supports my point. From the article:

Consider: Ordinary people in both parties turn out to like ordinary people in the other party well enough. In a 2021 study in the Journal of Politics, researchers found that when a person in one political party was asked what they think of someone in the other party, their answer was pretty negative. That certainly sounds like polarization. But it turns out the “someones” respondents had in mind were partisans holding forth on cable news.

If told the truth—that a typical member of the opposite party actually holds moderate views and talks about politics only occasionally—the animus dissolved into indifference. And if told that the same moderate person only rarely discusses politics, the sentiment edged into the positive zone. These folks might actually get along.

“There are people who are certainly polarized,” says Yanna Krupnikov, a study co-author now at the University of Michigan. “They are 100% polarized. They deeply hate the other side. They are extraordinarily loud. They are extraordinarily important in American politics.” But those people, she adds, are not typical Americans. They are people who live and breathe politics—the partisans and activists whom academics refer to in this context as elites.

That hardly recommends today’s politics, and goes a long way toward explaining why many people avoid partisans. “They dislike people who are ­really ideologically extreme, who are very politically invested, who want to come and talk to them about politics,” says Matthew Levendusky, a University of Pennsylvania professor of political science.

But, yes, moderates can, like progressives, want to improve the healthcare system and address climate change. Where they differ is in how they would go about it, and I think most moderates would prefer to go about addressing those issues by making as few radical changes as possible.