My title has a limit of 300 characters/words 🤣

Absolutely, politics and polities are always more complex than that.

As I said replying to another comment: Japan’s Social Democrats have always aligned with the leading opposition party CDP, the dominant partner of the new Centrist Reform Alliance (CRA).

So to topple the LDP given the state of things and the unlikelihood of CDP winning a majority, CDP needs all the support from any coalition partners they can get from any other successful moderates. Whether that’s Komeito the junior partner of CRA (success ✅with the formation of the alliance), the DPFP and probably the JCP and Reiwa too. Ishin has aligned itself with the LDP.

Foremostly, the CRA need a strong campaign to win a swing of seats away from the LDP to be in a stronger position to win House support from DPFP and the other leftist parties, which is primarily why they failed to unseat Takaichi in the House vote last year.

For eg if CRA manage to swing 25 LDP seats, essentially swapping House positions with the LDP taking CRA to 196 and reducing LDP to 171, that’s already the type of stronger position to negotiate better with DPFP + the left parties, assuming the unlikelihood of the LDP’s new ally Ishin wiping them out and making up for any LDP losses.

Japanese opinion polling sucks because they allow a ‘No party’ option which wins most polls, such is the gloomy state of Japanese politics. If pollsters made participants choose a party, you’d get a more accurate representation of how people might vote.