> All these were passed when public support was hovering at 25% - and shortly after they were passed, public opinion quickly shifted in an S-curve.
You're mistaking correlation for causation.
Things first pass when they have ~25% popular support because that's when they first get enough votes to pass in a two party system. You get 51% of the party that controls 51% of the legislature, your measure passes.
Then support for it increases because that's what it was doing to begin with, which was how it got to 51% of 51% from whatever smaller amount of support it had before it passed.
If you require a higher bar to change the law, it takes longer. But change inevitably still happens.
Slavery wasn't doomed by voting, it was doomed by economics. Before the industrial revolution, working on a plantation (essentially serfdom) compared favorably with your other alternatives, which typically consisted of starving to death in the wilderness. After the industrial revolution, you could run away to a city and get a job in a factory, which is what everybody started doing and the whole system started to disintegrate.
And it was the same thing for women's suffrage. It came about following economic and social changes that essentially made it inevitable in a modern society. It would have happened anyway. It did happen anyway, despite being passed by constitutional amendment in the US, which has a supermajority requirement for enactment.
By contrast, ill-conceived ideas that aren't inevitable would die when they go out of fashion without ever being implemented.
You're mistaking correlation for causation.
Things first pass when they have ~25% popular support because that's when they first get enough votes to pass in a two party system. You get 51% of the party that controls 51% of the legislature, your measure passes.
Then support for it increases because that's what it was doing to begin with, which was how it got to 51% of 51% from whatever smaller amount of support it had before it passed.
If you require a higher bar to change the law, it takes longer. But change inevitably still happens.
Slavery wasn't doomed by voting, it was doomed by economics. Before the industrial revolution, working on a plantation (essentially serfdom) compared favorably with your other alternatives, which typically consisted of starving to death in the wilderness. After the industrial revolution, you could run away to a city and get a job in a factory, which is what everybody started doing and the whole system started to disintegrate.
And it was the same thing for women's suffrage. It came about following economic and social changes that essentially made it inevitable in a modern society. It would have happened anyway. It did happen anyway, despite being passed by constitutional amendment in the US, which has a supermajority requirement for enactment.
By contrast, ill-conceived ideas that aren't inevitable would die when they go out of fashion without ever being implemented.