> The point is that voters don’t have many options. If you want to vote Republican, you pretty much have to choose anti-abortion. Polarization in action. This

> The point is that voters don’t have many options. If you want to vote Republican, you pretty much have to choose anti-abortion. Polarization in action. This seems confused. Voters don't make choices like republican or democrat. They choose among real humans who express a vision for future legislation. Wanting to "vote republican" doesn't make sense. You want to give a single person the power to cast a single vote. The game theory around aggregation and possible future worlds is all bundled up in the vote for the real human. Why would introducing referenda (binding narrow polls) cause the distribution of preferences to change? Political actors look at the population because they want to find hyperplanes to separate voter by likelihood of receiving a vote. Polarization is an optimal strategy. Political parties create coalitions of "directionally similar" voters because that's what power is. An army is just a group of people who all agree to stab the other guys. It doesnt matter what the issue is. They are on the opposite side. Saying polarization can be defused, seems like category error. Like you can't prevent the existence and discovery of correlations of preferences. Especially when the identification of the correlation is the primary avenue for the exercise of power.