Hollywood Popular Artists

Jul 30th 2012, 16:08

45 million 18-29 year olds will be eligible to vote in this year's presidential election, representing the largest potential voting bloc in the country. Learn more about the issues, register to vote and get involved with MTV's Power of 12. Today, we've got another "Jargon Buster" for you.

faction (noun): a subset of a political group; a political party within a party

Say what? A party within a party? Dang. Politics is beginning to sound like a ginormous night club — with house factions and hip-hop factions and trance factions and a chill-out room ...

If only.

Political factions, however, do dance to their own beat, in a way. Generally led by a strong personality or two (or ten), these subsets of political parties focus on highly specific agendas and with target purposes much more refined than the big picture represented by a given candidate — or the blanket stereotype associated with a given party.

Within the Democratic party, for example, labor unions have their own foothold, with strong voting populations, clear platform agendas and strong leadership.

Meanwhile, Republicans see a lot of support from the religious right, a voting population that fuses spiritual beliefs with socially conservative political values.

Are all Democrats members of labor unions? Of course not. Is every Republican part of the religious right? Nah. The more vocal the factions, however, the easier it is to forget those distinctions, to make sweeping assumptions about the parties as a whole. All the more reason to weed out the hoopla and really get familiar with candidates' platforms, proposals and messages...

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