• assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    It’s because politics matter that Obama couldn’t pull it off. Obamacare was what he could pull off with exactly 60 senators, before deaths dropped the number. If we wanted to have universal healthcare, we needed to expand our numbers in Congress.

    Instead, apathetic voters led to a huge conservative victory, and made it impossible for universal healthcare to happen.

    There’s a very important lesson here. Not voting for a Democrat in the general election because you wanted them to go further with their policy doesn’t get you those improvements. Instead, it gets Republicans to win and drive policy in the exact opposite direction.

    And therein is the vicious cycle of voter apathy. The gridlock and status quo of the Obama years was because voters didn’t show up in 2010. They didn’t show up because they wanted more accomplishments, which required more senators. And voters who were too apathetic to vote in even 2008 caused that.