I don’t mean for this to be a “well this post aged as well as last week’s milk”. It took me 2 weeks before I could even voice my shock at the result, and I’m not even American!
You’ve hopefully now read a hundred post-election dissections pointing to the tactics aimed at inherently irrational voters that won Trump a second term (nearly a third of their campaign budget on “She’s for they/them. He’s for you.” topic ads; the southern border problem, and that the Biden admin’s sequence of passing transgender bathroom legislation on Day-1, but waiting 2.5 years before attepting to do much of anything about the southern border only to have Trump nix it to be able to continue using the topic as a sledgehammer at the election 
), both sides promising lower prices at the supermarket, with left voters asking themselves the (hopefully rhetorical) question “well why are you waiting until after the election to do this?” and staying home on voting day, and right sheep saying “Great!”, etc etc etc.
45-49% of people vote one way or the other because that’s what they’ve always done having made up their mind before they turn 20, or having it decided for them by their family without a lot of thought of their own, leaving a sliver of ‘undecided voters’ to determine the outcome for everyone.
In the USA this problem is exacerbated by the Electoral College, which among other things, gives vast swaths of voters no reason to go out and vote at all, because the outcome is 99.9% certain, a problem no doubt exacerbated by the absurd level of electoral boundary jerrymandering that’s gone on over the past 20 years in your country); all those left voters who came out in droves in 2020, stayed home in 2024 because they didn’t like the cut of Harris’ jib, seemingly unaware of the consequences . That, and the continuing absence of anything resembling what we in Australia call ‘preferential voting’ which can sometimes break the two-party duopoly (sometimes called ‘Ranked voting’ and other variants of it) tho even this can still result in the marjor parties pandering to special interests to carry legislation.
I used to have utter contempt for these swing voters. As I’ve gotten older, and watched this polarisation grow (not just in the USA, but in countless liberal democracies across the world) leaving outcomes to these easily bought sliver of voters, I’ve come to realise that most voters are “low information voters”, and if anyone has a large-scale solution to that while at the same time maintaining two-party politics business-as-usual, well, I haven’t seen one yet.
Douglas Adams in one of his Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy books nailed it 40 years ago:
“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
― Douglas Adams, [The Restaurant at the End of the Universe]
This has all lead me to resurrecting an idea that’s been in the back of my head for many years: we must ditch - completely - this tribal notion of party politics, particularly two-party politics which is the logical consequence of a race to the bottom - grasping for as many of the thin sliver of low-information swing voters by any empty promise necessary.
A government must be allowed to push, or pull, on ALL the levers of of the economy and rule-making to achieve the necessary outcomes. Political Ideologies inherently - with pride, no less - advocate the prohibition of either team from ever pushing specific levers in specific directions, regardless of an absence of rationally defensible reasons or historical evidence with which to defend such prohibitions.
Our world has become far too complicated, and far too interconnected across state and national borders, and its problems far too pressing, to let dealing with these critical issues be used as political toys by those who’d much prefer to have the power over the other team, than to do anything useful with it, or worse, have their decisions swayed by the immense power of regulatory capture, thanks to the revolving door between government and big business, who demonstrate every day they couldn’t give a flying duck about consequences of wrong decisions if the right decision would threaten their profits.
I propose a system that’s more akin to Jury Duty, for deciding on the courses of action for a city / state / country’s governance, as a means to cut this Gordian Knot.
I need to start working through the basics of how such a system would work, address the myriad threats to its success, and the litany of naysays such a scheme would invariably attract. And obviously choose somewhere in which to publish said thoughts and attract much-needed feedback and suggestions from those who have far more knowledge of state governance than I do…
P.S. I’m still itching to read your 2nd essay on Doomberg. Even a privately emailed copy of the original… (techydude at gmail dot com)