Comment by benlivengood

> For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent.

The largest two U.S. parties have been heavily minmaxing the propaganda they release to divide districts on the most effective issues they can convert into election wins. Their values are "get elected to office" but the propaganda can't be so straightforward because there aren't a lot of voters who are easily converted by that directness.

Voters have values; political parties and candidates have propaganda. Game theoretically the winning move is to compete on comparative advantage of an issue within a voting district; because (for example) Democratic voters are split on the death penalty it's a very useless propaganda point for the party as a whole [0]; sticking to one side or the other would lose more elections than it would win. Note that this is very different from ranking the importance of values and focusing on the most impactful to real people; the (implicit) hope is that by focusing on effective propaganda issues then some values may be preserved through the election process. In practice politicians also horse-trade for future party political capital in preference to espoused values.

One fundamental problem is that without a parliamentary style of government where coalitions are required to form a functioning legislature the usefulness of values in elections is greatly diminished. If I may say, the Republican party has done the best at shedding the illusion and explicitly transferring power to the party itself to enforce the values held by one man, which is the ultimate game-theoretically strong position for a political party. Disconnecting the ultimate value-judged outcomes of elections from the political machinations that win them has been incredibly damaging to democracy.

[0] https://www.salon.com/2024/08/31/the-end-of-the-abolition-er...