Brad answered: >You can say that the one-step-to-the-left-of-the-center party is making a *mistake* when it shifts right, smelling that that's the way the votes have moved. But if you want to guarantee that it the shift right will *accelerate*, just let the one-step-to-the-left-of-the-center party be defeated--then all of its office-holders and potential office-holders will say: "Gee. There are even more voters to our right than we believed..."<
The problem with Brad's story (or rather the conclusion he draws from it) is that voting is a _very bad form of communication_. If you vote _for_ the one-milimeter-left-of-center party when it goes a centimeter to the right, then the party leadership says: "yes! we done good! you da man! let's go further in that direction. etc."
If, on the other hand, you decide _not_ to vote or vote for the one-milimeter-right-of-center party, then Brad's scenario works. The Party Elite says: the votes out there tell us to keep on going to the right. So the voter is stuck. Either voting for or against the "lesser of two evils" ends up with evil results.
It works better for the Big Money Boys. They vote with their dollars every day (not just every two to four years), via campaign contributions. If they call up the Pres. and say "Youngstown needs jobs" (or whatever), the Pres.'s underlings will look them up in the index of who's given money and who has the most money to give or whose district is most crucial. That means they're more likely to be invited to lunch (or bed) in the Whitehouse. They enjoy a _continual_ election and they can fine-tune their influence on politicians -- at the same time that they diversify their portfolios (i.e., make contributions to both of the major parties).
The continuous process of polling (that seems to have taken over the US) seems minor league compared to the continuous dollar-vote of the rich. The pollsters define the questions, often using vague ones like "how happy are you with the President's performance?," which doesn't really mean very much because the Prez's performance is multi-dimensional. More generally, the questions involved in the polling are almost always written "within the box" of the conventional wisdom of the political elite: they don't ask if Clinton's bombing of a Sudanese medicine factory is a crime that should be punished, for example. The polling process also treats people as isolated and passive individuals (unlike, say, focus groups). Of course, polls can be influenced by political advertising and thus by the weight of Big Money.
The dollar-vote allows a much more nuanced and much more active influence on what the pols do.
The way in which everyday folks (with little in the way of bucks to invest in buying politicians) is to _go beyond voting_. Letter-writing ("Dear Congressperson Z, I'm upset...") works better than voting, except that these days letter-writing campaigns are organized by Big Money. Besides, as everyone knows (and is demonstrated daily on lbo-talk), talk and letter-writing are cheap.
I think that if you want to influence the "one-milimeter-left-of-center" party, what you do is to threaten _not_ to vote -- but not abstain or vote for the "one-milimeter-right-of-center" party. Instead, vote for a _third_ party, like the Greens in New Mexico or Peace & Freedom in California (which should merge with the Greens, BTW). And like Warren Buffet's investors, _stick to your guns_ for a long long time rather than going for a short-term perspective and following the crowd. (Have some backbone, some principles.) The more that there are people voting for the alternative, the more the Dems and GOPs will start changing their policies in that direction. I am sure that the New Mexico Democratic Party is trying to figure out ways to attract Green voters, just as the national Democratic Party shifted to try to capture the Populist vote at the end of the last century. Why do you think that a twit like Ross Perot had his influence? because he could bring out the vote! If he had simply spent his megabux on ads, he would have been laughed off the stage even faster.
But it's not just elections. Working to organize labor unions that have grass-roots democratic involvement and policies (rather than hobnobbing with and kowtowing to management and the pols), it will influence the two official political parties. Demonstrations, sit-downs, etc. have an effect. Kennedy didn't care about Civil Rights until there was a mobilization of sit-down strikes in the South. Of course, we have to be creative about these things. Having the traditional "all us lefties together" rally upset about the Whitehouse's recent crimes won't do much. Journalism is relatively easy (though I guess I should ask Doug) and can have wide effects. But ultimately, it has to influence people to break with the bad choices that our leaders hand us, refuse to accept two versions of the _status quo_, and reject both the good cop and the bad.
Of course, we could use the legalistic road: the Starr Search has been a massive success for its partisans. But that costs a lot of money, while the Left lacks money (and the gov't isn't going to give it to us the way they did to Starr).
Organizing of people to mobilize their discontent is what's needed, though of course it's very difficult. But if we don't do this, we're stuck with Brad's mug's game, where you lose no matter what.
Jim Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html Bill's song: "Forgive me when my instincts start stinking; I'm easily led when my little head does the thinking." (lyrics by John Hiatt.)