Runaway inequalty since Reaganomics, but enabled by corporate-friendly neoliberal Dems, is the antithesis of moderation. Socialist rhetoric may or may not play in Peoria, but Bernie's, AOC's, and Mamdani's programs to improve the lives of working families are overwhelmingly popular just about everywhere.
Likewise, the divide and rule strategy of highlighting wedge issues to split the non-wealthy majority can be neutralized in most of the country by good old moderate live-and-let-live liberalism, then pivoting back to kitchen table issues.
Strong progressive candidates can win by pointing out that the common people are struggling and insecure because the 1% has been taking the lion's share of economic growth for decades (there is data: https://prospect.org/2025/12/03/79-trillion-heist-worker-pay/ ). As the notorious Willie Sutton explained when asked why he robbed banks, "that's where the money is".
Absolutely the elephant in the room. Since 1975, the 0.1% took more than the entire value of the US stock market from the 90%. This created an epidemic of Deaths of Despair and primed the 90% to vote for a liar who told them half truths:
"1) You've been screwed by the rich." (true)
2) "I will help you."(lie)
Meanwhile the Mega-Rich coopted the DNC with a trickle of all that lovely money, so Dems campaigned on helping downtrodden groups instead of helping the 90%, including those groups.
This triggered the expected backlash from the suffering 90% not in those groups, a mass of voters sufficient to produce MAGA wins.
I noticed you are too polite to mention that the Republican party has rejected the Median Voter Theory for some dedades now and done rather well in terms of results. I have my own issues with the Median Voter model being built from interpretation of polling data, but the fact that there is a sucessful party that completely rejects it should be some sort of wake-up call, let alone that the sucessful party has loudly and repeatedly announced its desire to eliminate the Median Voter completely. Chasing the votes of people who can't vote seems counter-productive.
This is in fact a background point of contention in this debate -- did Trump abandon the median voter by adopting extreme views like invading Greenland and shooting people in the streets, or did he move towards the median voter by abandoning Romeny-Ryan style views on Social Security, Medicare, and abortion. (I think the answer is both)
This gets into parsing the mindset and motivation of the Median Voter, which is consultant/pundit territory. All I can say is that Trump says whatever words his audience of the moment wants to hear, so the Median Voter had the option to select what he wanted Trump's views to be. My view is the Median Voter has no thought-out worldview that a politician must conform to consistently. Its what makes them Median. Comfort level matters more than ideology.
I think the stubborn refusal to loosen their grasp on some magical, inherently "correct" median voting position is also just intentionally disingenuous, because there is no admittance that the right has driven their end of the Overton Window off a cliff of extremism.
As a normal, decent person you have to come to terms with the basic reality that there is no "moderate" compromise to be found with actual fascists. They do not believe certain types of people should be allowed to exist or have rights. If you're one of the people they think shouldn't have rights, it's obviously a deal breaker that will cause you to *rightfully* reject their party. But then the moderate is *also* refusing to contend with the fact that the fascist party doesn't "want" those people to compromise or join them anyways... they want you to no longer exist.
The idea that halfway between these two positions is "optimal" is just intentionally obtuse, and refusing to honestly contend with what the primary core political agendas of each group truly are.
AND no one has been legitimately discriminating against white people in any way that can be significantly quantified, and yet we're supposed to treat that mythology as just as "true" & in need of resolution, as the decades of lawsuits that did uncover real discrimination against women and minorities. The fact that white (faux) Christian Nationalists currently mistake losing their undue prior *privileges* as "oppression" is a THEM problem, lodged deep in problems of their own psyches and narcissism. It's not "moderate" to take absolute bullshit nonsense as fact, and treat it the same as what's actually been going on in the real world. Halfway between reality and their delusions is not "the best we can do" and it's insulting that they keep trying to sell the rest of us that line of argument.
To be fair, the whole-hearted embrace of the weird klepto/fascism that Trump brought to the table is relatively recent. For decades the Republican party firmly kept on a reasonable mask in actual governance, while ratcheting up their rhetoric and system gaming shennanigans to motivate their base and hold onto power. Trump ripped that mask off and stompted it into the dirt and the party has just ... accepted it. They are less than unconcerned with the Moderate Voter.
But even if we think about the last 45 years, the Republican party has always been a party of lying to uphold a status quo that only benefits the ultra wealthy. Trickle down economics. That they are pro-life. That it's bad for the economy to have wage growth, and that "shareholders" are the only people who can matter when we make business and policy decisions. Treating all those positions as "equally valid" even though they are quantifiably bullshit lead us on a path to the current juncture, where their lies and violence are supposed to be taken as equally deserving of consideration as actual governance based on the real world conditions we're in.
Moderates wanted us to meet them halfway to their wantonly obtuse bullshit all along the way.
Yeah, but: the party always ultimately adhered to the rule of law. They bent it like Beckham and broke it from time to time, but they always acknowledged it existed. That's gone now, despite them so far mostly sometimes following legal judgements against them. They need to hold together the system around them they are corrupting and demolishing because they need the legitimacy it confers on them. They simply don't have the manpower to make every liberal city Minneapolis, though they would if they could.
This need to hold the system together is the last con preserving the Median Voter Theorem, the idea that both parties are still playing by the old rules and each party can pursue their strategy unhindered. That is already strained to the breaking point by the Georgia seizures and attempt to blackmail Minnesota into handing over the voter rolls. The Republican party has alrady announced it will use every means fair and foul to rig the 2028 midterms to hold onto Congress, and a dress rehearsal for 2028. The only reason they haven't passed an Enabling Act is they can't enforce it.
I'd say the Reagan Revolution proved that worrying where the center was is irrelevant if you can motivate your base while offering an "attractive" candidate, and there is nothing more attractive in American culture than a movie star. If the Republican party in 2028 ran Sidney Sweeney on a platform of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS she'd win in a walk. Every incentive in the world encourages them to do something like this.
It's a sad state of affairs we're in. On a brighter note, Sidney Sweeney told Trumpkopf to stop using her songs at any of his "rallies". She'd be a better president than The Orange Scourge!
Eh, a Republican Party that chased the median voter would be doing much better because since conservatives are ~40% of the population they're so much closer to winning by default if they didn't chase away moderates and swing voters.
A Larry Hogan/Brian Kemp ticket in 2024 instead of Trump would've won 350 EV's. Even before that, plenty of very right-wing Senate candidates lost seats for the GOP. Hell, I'd argue Arizona & Georgia have 4 Democratic Senators because of that.
Plus, while it may not be comfortable, Trump did moderate on the things the median voter thought the GOP was too right-wing on - Social Security and Medicare, convinced them he wasn't going to sign a national abortion ban (and likely actually wouldn't though Vance is another matter), and it turned out, voters don't actually care about corruption, democracy, etc. and basically heard what they wanted on immigration.
Now part of all of this is Trump was the most famous person to run for POTUS since Eisenhower and had 10 years on network TV being protrayed as a successful businessman.
In reality, unfortunately, the GOP should be the countries national governing party if we actually go by polling and the fact the Senate is tilted toward them.
To the extent I have a point, the Republican slide from reasonable conservative to MSG Nazi rally didn't change the fundamental see-saw of power between our 2 parties since WW2. Eisenhower/Jfk-LBJ/Nixon/Carter/Reagan-Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama/Trump. Starting with Reagan there was a 2-track campaign of moderate/winger messaging but that is what slid without affecting the overall outcome trend. The ModerTe Voter Theorem says Republican losses should have been greater. The reasons why they weren't are linked to that rightward slide.
And one of Trump's media insights that are anathema to professional politicians is that you just say words to fit your audience. Contradiction/consistency/reality are irrelevant. The Moderate Voter Theorem strongly implies this should be a death sentence for a campaign. Analysis why Harris and Clinton lost ignores why Trump didn't lose.
Do you realize that claiming Republicans should be the national governing party because of polling and how they've gamed the system is the most damning argument against the Moderate Voter Theorem?
I agree with you, but also perhaps a contingent factor is that the Republicans have been successful in implementing minority rule via the Supreme Court, Senate, and filibuster.
Harry Truman summed it up very succinctly: " Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time." This is why the Democrats' attempts at moderation have usually failed.
This is a superb essay, and one John Dewey would plaster with a hundred likes if he were around today. I can say for myself that, when teaching intro statistics, I always began with a class on "what are data?", which tried to impress students with the understanding that standardized measurements from a large number of cases can tell us a lot of useful things but also blind us to others. A good analogy is the relationship between epidemiology and toxicology/pathology when the latter take the form of lab experiments on one or a few cases. Each benefits from the other, done right.
A different way of framing the political question is, what's the goal? If it is *only* to get elected, that's one thing. But if it's to effect a set of political changes, then you have to interact the probability of electoral success with the mandate you get from it. Putting all the weight on the first and not taking account of how much juice it gives you to get where you want leads to the triangulation BS we have been through too often with the Democrats. (And putting all the weight on the second leads you into the lefty sectarian wilderness.)
Finally, a technical note. An additional assumption behind the median voter theorem is that voters' preferences are independent of one another; not only is the individual's preference map (along one dimension) single-peaked, but that also holds for the aggregate of voters. In other words, they don't pay attention to one another when forming their political views. This is really, really wrong, and union organizers in particular have a long history of addressing peer effects. (For the theorists out there, this is the problem of interactive nonconvexity.)
For one take on the multidimensional challenge, see my substack post on the ketchup theory of demonstrations.
And let us not forget the rôle influential pollsters play in framing the metrics, such as, e.g., the two Nates, Silver and Cohn, who continually bang on about "moderation the winning posture", and who termed the 2024 election results as a great "realignment", a phenomenon that always makes an appearance after a perhaps unexpected electoral win, but inevitably loses purchase next go-round. Already there are "fears" that a "Mamdanification" of the Dems will sink a yuuge opportunity for a "Blue wave", so keep to the center, chaps, and we get the win...uh-huh.
Britain is an interesting case in this regard. Like teh US, it is an FPTP system. The 2 major parties - Tories and labour vie for the voters. Like the US, the Labour party has drifted to the center, arguably now center-right. While Labour won in 2024 in a "landslide", they had teh lowest voter turnout. Worse, their policies are so different from the traditional Labour party that voter enthusiasm has turned away from them, with their leader, Sir Keir Starmer, polling lower than Trump. Yikes!
But other parties are now in contention. Reform UK, a right-wing party, is polling far higher than teh Tories, forcing teh Tories to drift towards their perception of the median RW voter. This isn't working, and a number of their MPs has defected to Reform. Similarly, the Green party has adopted policies more similar to the traditional labour Party and are polling ahead of Labour.
As in the US, it looks like voters are bimodal, polarizing towards their extremes. Running towards the global middle just searches for a few actual centrist voters. while the bulk of the voters wants a party that is either LW or RW.
In the US, the popularity of progressive (LW) legislators in the Democratic Party argues that a similar bimodal distribution holds here, too. There are the hard-core MAGA voters supporting Trump, who then uses those voters as a weapon to corral supine GOP politicians. Like Labour (starting with Blair's more centrist "New Labour"), Democrats have drifted to teh center as "corporate Democrats", as inequality has strengthened the wealthy donor class' hold on policy. The population wants more LW policies. But there is no comparable viable LW party in teh US, so the Democrats cannot get enough enthusiastic voters to vote for them.. As a result, LW voters are forced to vote D as a protest vote against Trump and his fascist policies. However, they do not offer policies to vote for them, and indeed, will not enact laws that LW voters actually want, as has been made clear by long term-studies of voter demands vs legislation enacted. As the Republican Party has become, de facto, a true far-RW party (let's call a spade a spade - a fascist party), and the Democrats remain a centrist party, there is no national party to represent the LW, which Britain's political parties demonstrate a desire for. Democrats need to move leftwards, but that means offering policies that actually benefit the bulk of the non-wealthy US population.
This is so totally true. As an aside, Blair's "New Labor" echos Clinton's "New kind of Democrat".
What's happened in this country is that the St. Reagan "revolution" sharply yanked the whole country - the center in particular - to the right. Far to the right. Since then, the distance between "conservative" and "fascist" can be measured with the flat side of a ice cream stick.
Oh, you think that was idiosyncratic, discursive, even meandering? Say hello to my little friend, "Immanuel Kant". Perhaps I really mean something like "Pierre Menard, author of the Critique of Pure Reason", but I don't think so; I think Kant got there in 1787. Paraphrased with a few strategic substitutions:
"It has hitherto been assumed that our cognition must conform to the [data]; but all attempts to ascertain anything about these [data] a priori, by means of conceptions, and thus to extend the range of our knowledge, have been rendered abortive by this assumption. Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in [data analysis] if we assume that the [data] must conform to our cognition."
Kant was refuted by non-Euclidian geometry, among other things. On Darwin's birthday we should appreciate that our cognition evolved to conform to (ie usefully model) physical reality.
There seems to be a "clarity trap" lurking in the moderate/left dichotomy, in that it abstracts away state-specific issues that are very outcome-determinative in US politics. Most notably, Democrats were winning Senate elections in places like Arkansas, the Dakotas, and West Virginia in recent memory - places they have no hope of competing now. This has very obvious downstream impact on things like the composition of the Supreme Court and the ability to break the filibuster, and that can explain a lot about the peril of our current moment.
The upshot is that I don't think you have to be an opinion-poll obsessed moderate to recognize that, if you care about short-to-medium term electoral performance, the party should "moderate" in the sense that it should be more open to accommodating idiosyncratic cultural and political preferences of states outside the coasts.
Why are we gaining all this power? To keep Republicans from abusing it? A noble goal, but not one that's going to inspire millions of dissatisfied voters over a long period of time. I think a lot about what Democrats were dreaming of policy wise 20 years ago. And how we keep finding ways to squander our majorities, either by following moderate policy platforms as in the Clinton and Obama years, or by self sabotaging ourselves in the name of normalcy and political forbearance like not getting rid of the Filibuster as in the Biden years.
What has been the result? Trifecta's, yes, but our inability to actually tackle the challenges we face, leads to voter apathy, backlash, and frustration. We've been waiting for comprehensive immigration reform since 1997. Universal Healthcare since 1960's. Comprehensive progressive Tax Reform since 2010. Sustained infrastructure improvements since 2006. The list goes.
Democratic politics must result in effective, lasting, policy or Trump will be the beginning, not the end, of our dance with authoritarianism.
Metrics leading businesses astray. BevMo! was an excellent, "big box" beverage store, with a wide variety of brands in many beverage categories - spirits, wines, sodas, etc. Prices were generally low. Then GoPuff bought them. A recent visit suggests that GoPuff has determined the most profitable lines to carry and severely reduced or eliminated many brands that were once carried. It is now a pale shadow of what BevMo! was. It may cater to some median drinker population, but has lost my business as there is little point in going to teh store as my favorite brands are no longer stocked.
This reminds me of an accountant friend who bought a wine merchant's on a small Caribbean island. Applying his accounting skills, he eliminated carrying expensive wines that were rarely sold and were just capital tied up in slow-moving inventory. The store went bust a few years later, as it was no longer the store that restaurants wanted to order from, as they couldn't buy those expensive wines that were always on the wine lists to indicate quality and for the extravagant customer to buy to impress companions. Perhaps a good example of simple metrics losing the "big picture" of wine purchasing.
Fully echo today's BevMo enshittification...and a side-note on Washington State eliminating its state-controlled liquor stores several years ago for the "free-market" version, after Costco and liquor-based interests bankrolled the state initiative that privatized liquor sales. When the state ran sales, one could request any and all spirits from domestic or foreign sources not carried by a local shop, and it would be ordered. Now, it's all homogenized and limited to "popular" brands, plus a 20% surcharge in addition to local sales taxes. As usual, consumers take it up the bum, and corporations get the rewards.
I really like your post because it was lately thinking about how the whole subject of economics (as it is usually taught) is a clarity trap. However, I did not have the term "clarity trap" for expressing my thoughts. I love economics, especially because of these moments of clarity that you gain from cutting through all this complexity of the real world. What the professors, in my experience, never tell you is that you also have to step back from these abstractions when you are thinking about concrete policies. There is never time for this. And then you end up thinking that the model is all there is to reality.
Regarding the clarity trap, I am reminded of "people stumble over molehills, not over mountains".
And of course, while the voters do not easily change, they do change. Having a message that entices them to consider change. And I have been thinking that *morals* are something that could be important. For one, the left should address the problem that has been at the root of many of our problems: the idea that 'greed is good'. I suspect that a message "Greed is bad. Free enterprise is good, freedom is good, but greed is bad" would be such a core message. And certainly in this day and age, it can be easily linked to everything from "President Swamp" to "Affordability". When FDR created the New Deal it brought an age of prosperity. But from day one, greed tried to get out of it, out of labor standards, minimum wages, etc.. And they succeeded by the 1980s to get the upper hand. The left still hasn't started to address this core issue (in fact, during the 1990s they accepted it), because as long as 'greed is good' is acceptable to many, there will not be enough popular demand to do something about it.
The message must be moral if it is to move the voters.
This is all about defining - finding - the currently relevant / acceptable Overton window. It may include new ideas, or may rehash old ones. The question is also, whether this window moves only up/down, right/left or forwards/backwards OR does it, in fact, swirl around in any & all directions; i.e. is it multi-dimensional?
"Clarity trap" is being too generous. If these consultants spoke to actual political scientists, they would hear from almost all of them that the median voter theorem is violated in dozens of well-known ways in practice. Heck, that is what almost every undergraduate instructor teaches in the first day when they cover this stuff. So loyalty to the model is not just due to its intrinsic intellectual clarity: rather, that sense of clarity has to be actively preserved in resistance to the entire modern discipline that considers it to be simplistic and largely useless for practical purposes.
That active preservation work either takes the form of ignoring almost the entire discipline of political science -- the very field that has been working for decades on the exact same issues these consultants work on -- or it takes the form of aggressively fighting with whatever political scientist speaks up under the apparent belief that they are all engaged in territorialism. "Clarity trap" may correctly describe someone encountering this idea for the first time, but does not describe what the professional consultants and the Democrats who pay them are doing.
Farrell noted some of the gross flaws in MVT: assumptions that voters ideologies lie on a one dimensional linear continuum, and that voters views are fixed and static, etc.
Mamdani is fresh air. Let's dream big. Let's experiment. Let's just try it. If we fail we will learn from our mistakes. Concentrated wealth is killing us.
Runaway inequalty since Reaganomics, but enabled by corporate-friendly neoliberal Dems, is the antithesis of moderation. Socialist rhetoric may or may not play in Peoria, but Bernie's, AOC's, and Mamdani's programs to improve the lives of working families are overwhelmingly popular just about everywhere.
Likewise, the divide and rule strategy of highlighting wedge issues to split the non-wealthy majority can be neutralized in most of the country by good old moderate live-and-let-live liberalism, then pivoting back to kitchen table issues.
Strong progressive candidates can win by pointing out that the common people are struggling and insecure because the 1% has been taking the lion's share of economic growth for decades (there is data: https://prospect.org/2025/12/03/79-trillion-heist-worker-pay/ ). As the notorious Willie Sutton explained when asked why he robbed banks, "that's where the money is".
Absolutely the elephant in the room. Since 1975, the 0.1% took more than the entire value of the US stock market from the 90%. This created an epidemic of Deaths of Despair and primed the 90% to vote for a liar who told them half truths:
"1) You've been screwed by the rich." (true)
2) "I will help you."(lie)
Meanwhile the Mega-Rich coopted the DNC with a trickle of all that lovely money, so Dems campaigned on helping downtrodden groups instead of helping the 90%, including those groups.
This triggered the expected backlash from the suffering 90% not in those groups, a mass of voters sufficient to produce MAGA wins.
All laid out in the 1972 Powell Memo.
A cheer for idiosyncratic writing! It’s proof that an AI or something else of equally boring taste didn’t write it.
I noticed you are too polite to mention that the Republican party has rejected the Median Voter Theory for some dedades now and done rather well in terms of results. I have my own issues with the Median Voter model being built from interpretation of polling data, but the fact that there is a sucessful party that completely rejects it should be some sort of wake-up call, let alone that the sucessful party has loudly and repeatedly announced its desire to eliminate the Median Voter completely. Chasing the votes of people who can't vote seems counter-productive.
This is in fact a background point of contention in this debate -- did Trump abandon the median voter by adopting extreme views like invading Greenland and shooting people in the streets, or did he move towards the median voter by abandoning Romeny-Ryan style views on Social Security, Medicare, and abortion. (I think the answer is both)
This gets into parsing the mindset and motivation of the Median Voter, which is consultant/pundit territory. All I can say is that Trump says whatever words his audience of the moment wants to hear, so the Median Voter had the option to select what he wanted Trump's views to be. My view is the Median Voter has no thought-out worldview that a politician must conform to consistently. Its what makes them Median. Comfort level matters more than ideology.
I think the stubborn refusal to loosen their grasp on some magical, inherently "correct" median voting position is also just intentionally disingenuous, because there is no admittance that the right has driven their end of the Overton Window off a cliff of extremism.
As a normal, decent person you have to come to terms with the basic reality that there is no "moderate" compromise to be found with actual fascists. They do not believe certain types of people should be allowed to exist or have rights. If you're one of the people they think shouldn't have rights, it's obviously a deal breaker that will cause you to *rightfully* reject their party. But then the moderate is *also* refusing to contend with the fact that the fascist party doesn't "want" those people to compromise or join them anyways... they want you to no longer exist.
The idea that halfway between these two positions is "optimal" is just intentionally obtuse, and refusing to honestly contend with what the primary core political agendas of each group truly are.
AND no one has been legitimately discriminating against white people in any way that can be significantly quantified, and yet we're supposed to treat that mythology as just as "true" & in need of resolution, as the decades of lawsuits that did uncover real discrimination against women and minorities. The fact that white (faux) Christian Nationalists currently mistake losing their undue prior *privileges* as "oppression" is a THEM problem, lodged deep in problems of their own psyches and narcissism. It's not "moderate" to take absolute bullshit nonsense as fact, and treat it the same as what's actually been going on in the real world. Halfway between reality and their delusions is not "the best we can do" and it's insulting that they keep trying to sell the rest of us that line of argument.
To be fair, the whole-hearted embrace of the weird klepto/fascism that Trump brought to the table is relatively recent. For decades the Republican party firmly kept on a reasonable mask in actual governance, while ratcheting up their rhetoric and system gaming shennanigans to motivate their base and hold onto power. Trump ripped that mask off and stompted it into the dirt and the party has just ... accepted it. They are less than unconcerned with the Moderate Voter.
But even if we think about the last 45 years, the Republican party has always been a party of lying to uphold a status quo that only benefits the ultra wealthy. Trickle down economics. That they are pro-life. That it's bad for the economy to have wage growth, and that "shareholders" are the only people who can matter when we make business and policy decisions. Treating all those positions as "equally valid" even though they are quantifiably bullshit lead us on a path to the current juncture, where their lies and violence are supposed to be taken as equally deserving of consideration as actual governance based on the real world conditions we're in.
Moderates wanted us to meet them halfway to their wantonly obtuse bullshit all along the way.
Yeah, but: the party always ultimately adhered to the rule of law. They bent it like Beckham and broke it from time to time, but they always acknowledged it existed. That's gone now, despite them so far mostly sometimes following legal judgements against them. They need to hold together the system around them they are corrupting and demolishing because they need the legitimacy it confers on them. They simply don't have the manpower to make every liberal city Minneapolis, though they would if they could.
This need to hold the system together is the last con preserving the Median Voter Theorem, the idea that both parties are still playing by the old rules and each party can pursue their strategy unhindered. That is already strained to the breaking point by the Georgia seizures and attempt to blackmail Minnesota into handing over the voter rolls. The Republican party has alrady announced it will use every means fair and foul to rig the 2028 midterms to hold onto Congress, and a dress rehearsal for 2028. The only reason they haven't passed an Enabling Act is they can't enforce it.
This is a result of the St. Reagan "revolution" that succeeded at sharply yanking the "center" to the right. Far to the right.
I'd say the Reagan Revolution proved that worrying where the center was is irrelevant if you can motivate your base while offering an "attractive" candidate, and there is nothing more attractive in American culture than a movie star. If the Republican party in 2028 ran Sidney Sweeney on a platform of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS she'd win in a walk. Every incentive in the world encourages them to do something like this.
Damn, that was depressing to read.
More depressing to write, and I mean every word.
It's a sad state of affairs we're in. On a brighter note, Sidney Sweeney told Trumpkopf to stop using her songs at any of his "rallies". She'd be a better president than The Orange Scourge!
Eh, a Republican Party that chased the median voter would be doing much better because since conservatives are ~40% of the population they're so much closer to winning by default if they didn't chase away moderates and swing voters.
A Larry Hogan/Brian Kemp ticket in 2024 instead of Trump would've won 350 EV's. Even before that, plenty of very right-wing Senate candidates lost seats for the GOP. Hell, I'd argue Arizona & Georgia have 4 Democratic Senators because of that.
Plus, while it may not be comfortable, Trump did moderate on the things the median voter thought the GOP was too right-wing on - Social Security and Medicare, convinced them he wasn't going to sign a national abortion ban (and likely actually wouldn't though Vance is another matter), and it turned out, voters don't actually care about corruption, democracy, etc. and basically heard what they wanted on immigration.
Now part of all of this is Trump was the most famous person to run for POTUS since Eisenhower and had 10 years on network TV being protrayed as a successful businessman.
In reality, unfortunately, the GOP should be the countries national governing party if we actually go by polling and the fact the Senate is tilted toward them.
To the extent I have a point, the Republican slide from reasonable conservative to MSG Nazi rally didn't change the fundamental see-saw of power between our 2 parties since WW2. Eisenhower/Jfk-LBJ/Nixon/Carter/Reagan-Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama/Trump. Starting with Reagan there was a 2-track campaign of moderate/winger messaging but that is what slid without affecting the overall outcome trend. The ModerTe Voter Theorem says Republican losses should have been greater. The reasons why they weren't are linked to that rightward slide.
And one of Trump's media insights that are anathema to professional politicians is that you just say words to fit your audience. Contradiction/consistency/reality are irrelevant. The Moderate Voter Theorem strongly implies this should be a death sentence for a campaign. Analysis why Harris and Clinton lost ignores why Trump didn't lose.
Do you realize that claiming Republicans should be the national governing party because of polling and how they've gamed the system is the most damning argument against the Moderate Voter Theorem?
I agree with you, but also perhaps a contingent factor is that the Republicans have been successful in implementing minority rule via the Supreme Court, Senate, and filibuster.
Harry Truman summed it up very succinctly: " Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time." This is why the Democrats' attempts at moderation have usually failed.
Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema come to mind.
Such a clear, helpful discussion of the current situation. Thanks, and for the book recommendation 😀
This is a superb essay, and one John Dewey would plaster with a hundred likes if he were around today. I can say for myself that, when teaching intro statistics, I always began with a class on "what are data?", which tried to impress students with the understanding that standardized measurements from a large number of cases can tell us a lot of useful things but also blind us to others. A good analogy is the relationship between epidemiology and toxicology/pathology when the latter take the form of lab experiments on one or a few cases. Each benefits from the other, done right.
A different way of framing the political question is, what's the goal? If it is *only* to get elected, that's one thing. But if it's to effect a set of political changes, then you have to interact the probability of electoral success with the mandate you get from it. Putting all the weight on the first and not taking account of how much juice it gives you to get where you want leads to the triangulation BS we have been through too often with the Democrats. (And putting all the weight on the second leads you into the lefty sectarian wilderness.)
Finally, a technical note. An additional assumption behind the median voter theorem is that voters' preferences are independent of one another; not only is the individual's preference map (along one dimension) single-peaked, but that also holds for the aggregate of voters. In other words, they don't pay attention to one another when forming their political views. This is really, really wrong, and union organizers in particular have a long history of addressing peer effects. (For the theorists out there, this is the problem of interactive nonconvexity.)
For one take on the multidimensional challenge, see my substack post on the ketchup theory of demonstrations.
And let us not forget the rôle influential pollsters play in framing the metrics, such as, e.g., the two Nates, Silver and Cohn, who continually bang on about "moderation the winning posture", and who termed the 2024 election results as a great "realignment", a phenomenon that always makes an appearance after a perhaps unexpected electoral win, but inevitably loses purchase next go-round. Already there are "fears" that a "Mamdanification" of the Dems will sink a yuuge opportunity for a "Blue wave", so keep to the center, chaps, and we get the win...uh-huh.
Britain is an interesting case in this regard. Like teh US, it is an FPTP system. The 2 major parties - Tories and labour vie for the voters. Like the US, the Labour party has drifted to the center, arguably now center-right. While Labour won in 2024 in a "landslide", they had teh lowest voter turnout. Worse, their policies are so different from the traditional Labour party that voter enthusiasm has turned away from them, with their leader, Sir Keir Starmer, polling lower than Trump. Yikes!
But other parties are now in contention. Reform UK, a right-wing party, is polling far higher than teh Tories, forcing teh Tories to drift towards their perception of the median RW voter. This isn't working, and a number of their MPs has defected to Reform. Similarly, the Green party has adopted policies more similar to the traditional labour Party and are polling ahead of Labour.
As in the US, it looks like voters are bimodal, polarizing towards their extremes. Running towards the global middle just searches for a few actual centrist voters. while the bulk of the voters wants a party that is either LW or RW.
In the US, the popularity of progressive (LW) legislators in the Democratic Party argues that a similar bimodal distribution holds here, too. There are the hard-core MAGA voters supporting Trump, who then uses those voters as a weapon to corral supine GOP politicians. Like Labour (starting with Blair's more centrist "New Labour"), Democrats have drifted to teh center as "corporate Democrats", as inequality has strengthened the wealthy donor class' hold on policy. The population wants more LW policies. But there is no comparable viable LW party in teh US, so the Democrats cannot get enough enthusiastic voters to vote for them.. As a result, LW voters are forced to vote D as a protest vote against Trump and his fascist policies. However, they do not offer policies to vote for them, and indeed, will not enact laws that LW voters actually want, as has been made clear by long term-studies of voter demands vs legislation enacted. As the Republican Party has become, de facto, a true far-RW party (let's call a spade a spade - a fascist party), and the Democrats remain a centrist party, there is no national party to represent the LW, which Britain's political parties demonstrate a desire for. Democrats need to move leftwards, but that means offering policies that actually benefit the bulk of the non-wealthy US population.
This is so totally true. As an aside, Blair's "New Labor" echos Clinton's "New kind of Democrat".
What's happened in this country is that the St. Reagan "revolution" sharply yanked the whole country - the center in particular - to the right. Far to the right. Since then, the distance between "conservative" and "fascist" can be measured with the flat side of a ice cream stick.
Oh, you think that was idiosyncratic, discursive, even meandering? Say hello to my little friend, "Immanuel Kant". Perhaps I really mean something like "Pierre Menard, author of the Critique of Pure Reason", but I don't think so; I think Kant got there in 1787. Paraphrased with a few strategic substitutions:
"It has hitherto been assumed that our cognition must conform to the [data]; but all attempts to ascertain anything about these [data] a priori, by means of conceptions, and thus to extend the range of our knowledge, have been rendered abortive by this assumption. Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in [data analysis] if we assume that the [data] must conform to our cognition."
Kant was refuted by non-Euclidian geometry, among other things. On Darwin's birthday we should appreciate that our cognition evolved to conform to (ie usefully model) physical reality.
There seems to be a "clarity trap" lurking in the moderate/left dichotomy, in that it abstracts away state-specific issues that are very outcome-determinative in US politics. Most notably, Democrats were winning Senate elections in places like Arkansas, the Dakotas, and West Virginia in recent memory - places they have no hope of competing now. This has very obvious downstream impact on things like the composition of the Supreme Court and the ability to break the filibuster, and that can explain a lot about the peril of our current moment.
The upshot is that I don't think you have to be an opinion-poll obsessed moderate to recognize that, if you care about short-to-medium term electoral performance, the party should "moderate" in the sense that it should be more open to accommodating idiosyncratic cultural and political preferences of states outside the coasts.
Agreed, but to what end?
Why are we gaining all this power? To keep Republicans from abusing it? A noble goal, but not one that's going to inspire millions of dissatisfied voters over a long period of time. I think a lot about what Democrats were dreaming of policy wise 20 years ago. And how we keep finding ways to squander our majorities, either by following moderate policy platforms as in the Clinton and Obama years, or by self sabotaging ourselves in the name of normalcy and political forbearance like not getting rid of the Filibuster as in the Biden years.
What has been the result? Trifecta's, yes, but our inability to actually tackle the challenges we face, leads to voter apathy, backlash, and frustration. We've been waiting for comprehensive immigration reform since 1997. Universal Healthcare since 1960's. Comprehensive progressive Tax Reform since 2010. Sustained infrastructure improvements since 2006. The list goes.
Democratic politics must result in effective, lasting, policy or Trump will be the beginning, not the end, of our dance with authoritarianism.
Metrics leading businesses astray. BevMo! was an excellent, "big box" beverage store, with a wide variety of brands in many beverage categories - spirits, wines, sodas, etc. Prices were generally low. Then GoPuff bought them. A recent visit suggests that GoPuff has determined the most profitable lines to carry and severely reduced or eliminated many brands that were once carried. It is now a pale shadow of what BevMo! was. It may cater to some median drinker population, but has lost my business as there is little point in going to teh store as my favorite brands are no longer stocked.
This reminds me of an accountant friend who bought a wine merchant's on a small Caribbean island. Applying his accounting skills, he eliminated carrying expensive wines that were rarely sold and were just capital tied up in slow-moving inventory. The store went bust a few years later, as it was no longer the store that restaurants wanted to order from, as they couldn't buy those expensive wines that were always on the wine lists to indicate quality and for the extravagant customer to buy to impress companions. Perhaps a good example of simple metrics losing the "big picture" of wine purchasing.
Fully echo today's BevMo enshittification...and a side-note on Washington State eliminating its state-controlled liquor stores several years ago for the "free-market" version, after Costco and liquor-based interests bankrolled the state initiative that privatized liquor sales. When the state ran sales, one could request any and all spirits from domestic or foreign sources not carried by a local shop, and it would be ordered. Now, it's all homogenized and limited to "popular" brands, plus a 20% surcharge in addition to local sales taxes. As usual, consumers take it up the bum, and corporations get the rewards.
I really like your post because it was lately thinking about how the whole subject of economics (as it is usually taught) is a clarity trap. However, I did not have the term "clarity trap" for expressing my thoughts. I love economics, especially because of these moments of clarity that you gain from cutting through all this complexity of the real world. What the professors, in my experience, never tell you is that you also have to step back from these abstractions when you are thinking about concrete policies. There is never time for this. And then you end up thinking that the model is all there is to reality.
Beautiful.
Regarding the clarity trap, I am reminded of "people stumble over molehills, not over mountains".
And of course, while the voters do not easily change, they do change. Having a message that entices them to consider change. And I have been thinking that *morals* are something that could be important. For one, the left should address the problem that has been at the root of many of our problems: the idea that 'greed is good'. I suspect that a message "Greed is bad. Free enterprise is good, freedom is good, but greed is bad" would be such a core message. And certainly in this day and age, it can be easily linked to everything from "President Swamp" to "Affordability". When FDR created the New Deal it brought an age of prosperity. But from day one, greed tried to get out of it, out of labor standards, minimum wages, etc.. And they succeeded by the 1980s to get the upper hand. The left still hasn't started to address this core issue (in fact, during the 1990s they accepted it), because as long as 'greed is good' is acceptable to many, there will not be enough popular demand to do something about it.
The message must be moral if it is to move the voters.
This is all about defining - finding - the currently relevant / acceptable Overton window. It may include new ideas, or may rehash old ones. The question is also, whether this window moves only up/down, right/left or forwards/backwards OR does it, in fact, swirl around in any & all directions; i.e. is it multi-dimensional?
Unfortunately, it seems to be the latter.
"Clarity trap" is being too generous. If these consultants spoke to actual political scientists, they would hear from almost all of them that the median voter theorem is violated in dozens of well-known ways in practice. Heck, that is what almost every undergraduate instructor teaches in the first day when they cover this stuff. So loyalty to the model is not just due to its intrinsic intellectual clarity: rather, that sense of clarity has to be actively preserved in resistance to the entire modern discipline that considers it to be simplistic and largely useless for practical purposes.
That active preservation work either takes the form of ignoring almost the entire discipline of political science -- the very field that has been working for decades on the exact same issues these consultants work on -- or it takes the form of aggressively fighting with whatever political scientist speaks up under the apparent belief that they are all engaged in territorialism. "Clarity trap" may correctly describe someone encountering this idea for the first time, but does not describe what the professional consultants and the Democrats who pay them are doing.
It's confirmation bias. The consultants always turn to data that confirm their pet "theories".
Farrell noted some of the gross flaws in MVT: assumptions that voters ideologies lie on a one dimensional linear continuum, and that voters views are fixed and static, etc.
You are a genius! Anybody listening from the DNC???
Mamdani is fresh air. Let's dream big. Let's experiment. Let's just try it. If we fail we will learn from our mistakes. Concentrated wealth is killing us.