[PaulDavisThe1st]

> It seems obvious that of the 120 million people who weren’t motivated to vote

Could be true, but it's certainly not "obvious". There are myriad reasons (especially in the USA) why people might not vote that nothing to do with their political opinions (ideology or intensity). I am sure that a significant number of the 120 million non-voters were "not motivated", but not all of them. And of the "not motivated", it is hard to know the real reasons why and what it means. Some of them, for example, would never vote, regardless of who ran or what the platforms were. Maybe some of them would vote for radical progressive if there was one with credible chance of winning. Maybe some of them would vote for a blatantly Mussolini-inspired candidate. Either way, it isn't obvious that motivation was the reason to not vote for all of them and it certainly isn't clear that they are more likely to be "latent conservatives".

[esja]

You’re right, it’s not obvious. And perhaps to strengthen your point, countries with compulsory voting (e.g. Australia) don’t seem to show any particular skew.

Regarding the original point, Pew published some interesting stats on voter preferences:

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-v...

According to this, progressives are a very small slice of the population, and nowhere near a majority even if you include adjacent groups.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

The Pew study is interesting, but I feel that it's whole approach manages to elide the more important question of what specific policies a majority of the population would support. It is clear (in general, and in the Pew report) that there are many policies that both the "progressive left" and "conservative right" will never agree on. But it is less clear what might be the support for policies like e.g. government industrial policy involving investment in US-based businesses which can be spun either way but are generally "populist".

Alas, we appear unlikely to find out, since no presidential/senate candidate is going to do anything truly populist with economic policy for fear of pissing off the big donors.

[esja]

Yes, that’s the big unknown. It’s hard for any sort of anti-establishment populist to emerge. Trump is an example of this: he basically ran against both parties, was rendered ineffective, and they haven’t stopped trying to bury him. Ross Perot, Ron Paul & Bernie Sanders covered similar ground (albeit from different angles) and hit the same wall.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

According to Pew, the wall they ran into is that their policies are not popular enough.

But anyway, I do not consider Trump as having been rendered ineffective, and he certainly isn't buried.

More centrally, there's no obligation of those with the (literal or metaphorical) printing presses to spread the good word Our Favorite Populist of the moment. In the USA, we ceded control of "the press" to the private sector, without any expectation that they would ever act against the interests of their owners. There's no reason why any multi-(m|b)illion corporation is ever going to champion Bernie Sander's policies. On the other hand, Trump's policies (from day one) were just fine for the largest news organization on the planet, precisely because they were never threatening to the status quo.

If people actually want to hear populist policies, they're going to have to pay attention to something other than corporate owned media, regardless of its nominal political orientation.