Having grown up in the Philippines and being politically aware since high school, most of the campaigns for national office revolve around pandering to the massive throngs of urban and rural poor. Most of this pandering involves some version of eat-the-rich class warfare rhetoric that aims to promise redistribution of wealth. The Philippines is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a socialist nation, but as an emerging economy, it is fraught with pitfalls and challenges that many American observers find easy to point out and difficult to solve.

The most annoying aspect of Philippine politics is that none of the political parties have a clearly defined platform that distinguishes one form the other. You have a central personality as the anchor of the party, and everyone else rides that person’s coattails. The promises of goodies at the expense of the taxpayer is de rigeur, and some days it feels like a choice between Engels or Marx.

So when I moved here, being the short-sighted, middle-class Liberal funded by my mother’s hard-earned money, the distinction between the political parties in terms of principle is like night and day. It was refreshing, and through a long process of unlearning ideas such as entitlement and hatred of producers, I became the Conservative that so many people know and love (or revile, depending on your beliefs).

The method by which the two monolothic parties build their coalitions, also differ like night and day. Democrats build coalitions by promising fulfillment of a group’s pet issue. This is why they nail the gay vote, the woman vote, votes from different ethnic groups, name it. Republicans, on the other hand, make one issue the defining issue of a campaign, and they pick off voters from the groups that agree with them.

This is how Scott Brown campaigned. He insisted on being the forty-first vote to prevent cloture (I’m a stickler for words, a topic I intend to write about soon enough). He made opposition to the Democrat-controlled healthcare reform his single, defining issue. He built his identity around that and the people came. They came for their own reasons, of course, but he didn’t spend his campaign promising goodies to groups. He found a case that he believed was enough to get people to sacrifice their pet issues and focus on something else.

These tactics also lead to each parties’ undoing. In this country, no single party stays in power for too long. Americans remain suspicious of absolute power and prefer to tip the balance the other way. Once the issue around which Republican voters coalesce is resolved, it is up to the incumbents to find another issue to rally around. If they fail, the infighting begins: people’s instincts start to take precedence. The same people who voted for Brown in opposition to Obamacare will be the same people who will oppose him on social issues, given that Brown leans pro-choice.

Democrats, on the other hand, lose votes when they fail to deliver on those many goodies they offer (gay marriage, anyone?). They also fail when they use the groups they court as weapons against the middle, such as when the current—and soon to be dead—version of Demcare exempts union members from the “Cadillac plan tax.” They fail because they realize these concessions are extreme and divisive and come at the expense of those whose money they want for contributions.

After stating these observations, what advice do I have for the Republican party? When the pendulum swings in your favor, it’s time to use it, or lose it. For the Democrats? I have a few thoughts, but the most prudent of politicos don’t take advice from their opponents anyway.