Vote for Status Quo

Alan Wolfe closes his column, “Partisanship Pulls Voters Two Ways,” July 20, by saying that the intense degree of political partisanship evident in this year’s campaigns can “energize each party’s base” or “sour the independents and centrists and keep them from voting at all.”

I think the practitioners of partisanship are trying to do both: turn out their most reliable supporters in the electorate and discourage people whose views -- and votes -- are unpredictable from casting ballots.

For three decades, the conventional wisdom among party officials and campaign managers and consultants has been that it’s useless and a waste of money and resources to try to “grow the electorate” -- i.e., to register new voters and give your candidate the advantage that way.

Instead, they compete for a bigger slice of an ever-smaller voter pool and rage against such reforms as nonpartisan primaries, instant-runoff voting, proportional representation and more competitive redistricting that might actually encourage more people to vote -- but would also make the electorate less predictable and therefore harder to target.

Mark Gabrish Conlan

San Diego