All us WEIRD (western educated industrialized rich democratic) countries seem to spend a really embarrassing amount of time talking about the pointless minutiae surrounding our candidates for office and their personal lives.

We are also prone to backing very crap candidates based on personality, rhetoric, appearance ie: things that have nothing to do with being a good executive or legislator.

I think we should ban names from the election process and just have each party submit their ideas in writing and let people vote based on those submissions.

  • jecxjo@midwest.socialEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    When those politicians are up for re-election, it’s fairly easy for someone to tabulate whether or not those goals were met. If there are extenuating circumstances (overwhelming opposition, for example), then they can use that to defend themselves. This would help hold their feet to the fire.

    Oddly it seems like little to no Republican voters recognize that Trump never passed anything of substance. They also seem to not understand how the economy actually works, see that during a booming economy Trump ran up one of the largest deficits. Trump sought to get rid of major safety nets which lower and middle class tend to use the most and tend to also be the redest counties.

    If you tabulate up all the pros and cons for the Republican candiate, aside from normalizing hate, all of the perceived benefits are just voters not paying attention in their civics classes in highschool. I don’t think expecting voters to actually do their due diligence really works.

    • sensiblepuffin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      You’re not wrong. We have a representative democracy because the Founders thought the same way. I guess I prefer not to believe that it’s impossible for people to be well-informed enough to make a good decision on these things. I’ve certainly seen some new lows in the past 10 years.