Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

Mandatory voting would wreck the business model of modern campaigning, and honestly that's the best argument for it. Right now elections are decided by turnout operations: who can drag their angriest 30 percent to the polls. So candidates perform for the extremes and ignore everyone else. Force everybody to show up and the math flips. The median voter actually becomes the median person, not the median activist. Politicians would have to persuade the exhausted nurse working doubles and the 19-year-old who thinks both parties are a scam, instead of just terrifying their base about the other side. Would some people still vote randomly or leave blanks? Sure. But campaigns chasing the whole country would sound different from campaigns chasing a third of it, and I would like to hear what that sounds like.