Partisan capture is terminal
Once a civic platform is seen to belong to one side, it is dead to the other, and neutrality cannot be retrofitted.
The pattern
A platform meant to serve all constituents picks up a partisan tilt. It can come through the founders, the funders, the early user base or the rhetoric. The other half of the electorate concludes the platform is not for them. Perceived neutrality, once lost, is almost impossible to recover.
How it shows up
Adoption that breaks cleanly along party lines. Coverage that frames the tool as belonging to one movement. Officials from the "wrong" side declining on principle to engage.
What Agora does about it
Agora holds a non-partisan, governmental-grade voice and takes no positions of its own. The wedge does the structural work. Every conversation is anchored to the substance of an official's work, not to a partisan stance, so the platform belongs to the office and the constituency and to neither side.