Not much gets accomplished in American politics as the raging battle between the two political parties has gone on for my entire lifetime (70 years.) I started following politics as a very young lad (8 years old) who read the newspaper daily and watched TV news and met my first U.S. president, General Dwight David Eisenhower, at age 17.
It has always been a struggle of (approximately) one-third registered Democrats, one-third registered Republicans and one-third independents whose votes divide (almost) equally between Democrats and Republicans and who, ultimately, decide elections.
Being a highly educated individual (13 years of college studies) I started out as a lower middle class liberal, then developed into a middle class progressive, took on some conservative viewpoints on various issues as I grew into old age increasing my salary earnings into the upper middle class, reclassified myself as an independent as I became sensitized to the fading resources of Mother Earth, and finally settled down to be a full-blown environmentalist, fiscal conservative and a social moderate today. Not your usual steadfast ideologue.
I rarely had an opportunity to vote for a candidate, but usually had to hold my nose and vote for the lesser of the two evils. By mostly voting Democratic I was actually voting against the Republicans – as I felt they were the more evil to the environment.
Growing up and being educated and then earning my living in big city America resulted in my being exposed to the headquarters of very large corporations that cheated consumers who used their products and services, avoided paying a fair share of their taxes, and could care less if they destroyed the environment in order to make profits, so that caused me to look to big government to protect me from them and save the environment.
In my retirement years (now) I moved to rural America where there are no big corporations and find that the mentality of the local citizens is to hate big government intrusion into their rural lives, which then favors the destructive greed and avarice of big city corporations.
It is a three-way contest of tug-of-war: the people; uncontrolled corporate greed; government regulatory intrusion. How people vote depends on their perspective of the lesser of the two evils: Corporations (Republicans) dictating how they live their lives; or big government (Democrats) that over-protects them from those corporations.
Which is the lesser of the two evils? The pendulum swings back and forth between the choices.
Bill Baum
Badrock Canyon