Bret Devereaux

I'm not an expert but I also assume these only have no particular partisan impact against the backdrop of a country in which most people don't vote; the electorate we're taking as a baseline is always already gerrymanderedhttps://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1378416124614877184 …

This discourse is continuing and honestly seems really obtuse to me!

My impression of the fancy statistics is that the party-line balance of a 100% voter participation country would look much like our normal ~55% turnout country. But that doesn't change the fact that these guys are trying to win by turning away voters.

I'm extremely skeptical it's possible to model that in a significant way. I think 100% turnout from heretofore disenfranchised populations would have to transform our politics in ways that would affect both parties

So I think transform parties is a different question from 'alter the balance between them.' We just had an incredible test-case for what happens if you massively juice voter turnout and the answer was very nearly static in terms of partisan balance.

BUT I think we can absolutely see that changes in the turnout model *are* changing the GOP - a lot of the Trumpy energy is coming from 'low propensity voters' after all who are just now turning out. It's caused a lot of sudden shifts in GOP positions e.g. on trade, etc.

I think there is an assumption that a 100% turnout democratic party would be much more progressive, but this doesn't seem to be borne out by the data - left-progressives already vote at high rates, the low-propensity democratic voters tend to be more conservative.

We've argued about this before, I think liberal/conservative self-identification is next to useless when thinking about what kinds of actual policy would be driven by different groups of voters.