I put it to you that the most natural fit for what you are proposing is a new political party which chooses not to put candidates on the ballot.
It does seem necessary to settle the terminology better; I agree that the terms I’ve been inconsistently using so far seem inadequate (voting bloc, platform, movement, group, …?). I’m still not convinced “party” is the best term. But I have some sympathy for your points.
I would much prefer that people call the group “the new center” or “neocentrists” or whatever, as opposed to “the new center party” “the moderate party” etc.
Alas, running (or even starting) a party/whatever sounds incredibly time consuming. :(
If you were to go to the national level, absolutely. But I expect that a local-level experiment could be done entirely part-time on a volunteer basis. I expect this because the local-level major party apparatus is usually a part-time volunteer operation. Further, the threshold for success is much, much lower: you can achieve kingmaker status in a lot of locales by forging a bloc of a score of votes.
It does seem necessary to settle the terminology better; I agree that the terms I’ve been inconsistently using so far seem inadequate (voting bloc, platform, movement, group, …?). I’m still not convinced “party” is the best term. But I have some sympathy for your points.
I would much prefer that people call the group “the new center” or “neocentrists” or whatever, as opposed to “the new center party” “the moderate party” etc.
Alas, running (or even starting) a party/whatever sounds incredibly time consuming. :(
If you were to go to the national level, absolutely. But I expect that a local-level experiment could be done entirely part-time on a volunteer basis. I expect this because the local-level major party apparatus is usually a part-time volunteer operation. Further, the threshold for success is much, much lower: you can achieve kingmaker status in a lot of locales by forging a bloc of a score of votes.