It’s not necessarily the vote itself that does all the heavy lifting. Politicians pay a lot of attention to the stats of which groups are consistently voting and which issues are important for them, much more so than for what is important to the population at large because their bottom line is appealing to the people who show up to vote. Even if those votes are associated with their opponent if it’s a big enough block then throwing a bone to attract their vote becomes appealing.

For example, old people are one of the most highly consistent blocks of voters and (in our aging society) a growing one, too. Everyone wants to appeal to them as the math gets a lot harder if old people totally reject you! So with politicians competing for their support, social security & medicare make up over 50% of all the increase in government spending (not including more interest in the loans to pay for that which is also very substantial), even though the government already spends six times more on the average 65+ person than on the children and young adults <26, despite the latter group being substantially more likely to be in poverty. It’s not an economically sound decision, investing in the youth would provide better returns for society by setting them on a better trajectory for all the working life they have yet to live. But most of the ages in that younger block are not allowed to vote and the older near 26 are very inconsistent at voting, so their concerns really do not matter to politicians except insofar as the children are a concern of their parents who are much more likely to be voting.

Even if a movement is very popular with the general public, if that movement isn’t in the habit of voting politicians aren’t likely to stick out their neck for it if there are other more reliable voters they can appeal to. Because that would be seen as a wasted effort that won’t help them to win. But if a generally unpopular movement or view is popular with voters then politicians will tend to stand by it no matter what the general public has to say.

Dr. Oz is also nuts so it was kind of cooked regardless of what happened past the primaries

She’d probably love playing Candy Crush at Assad’s gamer pad in Moscow

I’d say good riddance but who knows what sort of creep they’ll put in there. That said, this lives in my brain whenever I hear her name, as does that they had to cover Caesar’s face so she wouldn’t leak his identity:

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

The like one good idea she had is that she opposed war with Iran but her voice clearly lost out against the likes of Bibi and Lindsey Graham.