It rebuts the myth, quite popular on and off this board, that there exists some large group of “moderate” voters who feel that both major parties are too extreme and are looking for a “centrist” alternative. The corollary is that, in order to win elections, parties need to fight off their ideologically pure wings and field candidates who appeal to the “center”. Well, guess what, it’s all bullshit.
What the data shows is that “moderate” and “independent” are labels used by mostly low-information voters whose actual policy preferences are all over the map. Many “moderates” support rather extreme policies, at least with regard to some issues; they may fall in line with one party’s position on some issues and the other on others. There is no policy platform that is capable of uniting all these voters, because they want radically different things. And besides, since they’re low information voters, their voting decisions often bear little relation to the policies they tell pollsters they would like to see enacted.
There was a politician in my home state that delivered a memorable quote on that subject. “There ain’t anything in the middle of the road but dead skunks and a yellow stripe.”
The quote was so memorable that I’ve completely forgotten who said it, but I generally agree with the sentiment.
Another quote is “Asking middling-centrist voters what issues they care about elicits a blank stare from them, as if I’d asked them what their favorite prime number is.”
I think moderates have been hunted to near extinction. Elections aren’t won any more by appealing to the middle, they’re won by ginning up the base. Appealing to moderates is a losing strategy, you wind up turning off your base.
Also mythical- the independent voter. If records were available, I bet they would show that most people vote for one party nearly exclusively and it would only be the rare exception that votes for D or R in different elections.
Do you expect people to give up referring to “the left” and “the right”? Good luck with that.
But as long as we refer to voters/politicians/parties as left or right, it’s natural to think of them as existing somewhere along a linear continuum. Under that model, voters will choose between two candidates by selecting the one that’s closer on that continuum, even if (s)he’s just a little closer than the other candidate. Then the smartest strategy for a party that wants to win the election is to run a candidate that’s just a little to the left (or right, depending on the party) of the other candidate, to be the choice of the maximum number of voters.
I’m a moderate voter. I’m not mythical. I’m just not represented by the leftwing and right wing. Not every American is partisan. Independents still decide elections.
Bob, I’m sure data does exist on that, but I don’t have it handy. According to this study, though, only 4.3% of voters both identify as independents and aren’t sure which party’s Presidential candidate they will support next year. Only 5.3% of voters are undecided “moderates”. So, yeah.
The article also makes the point that “moderates” as a group are actually somewhat left of center and more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans. This is likely due to the Reagan-era branding strategy that led Republicans to embrace the “conservative” label, while making Democrats skittish of claiming to be “liberals”.
Thudlow, the point is that that model is fatally flawed,because many voters can’t be placed along a left-right continuum. For example, consider a voter who supports Medicare for All, but opposes same-sex marriage. Is that voter to the left or the right of a voter who takes the opposite positions? You could say that on average they’re both “moderates”, but it’s pretty unlikely they’ll ever be enthusiastic about the same candidate. And then you have to consider that many voters don’t vote on policy at all, but on some variation of the “who would I like to have a beer with?” test, and that such voters are likely to self-define as “moderates”.
The model of the left-right continuum is appealingly simplistic and produces an easily grasped strategy for winning, but it simply doesn’t fit reality.
Sure, self-identified “moderates” constitute about a third of the electorate, and independents about a sixth. So it’s trivially true that you can’t win an election without appealing to those voters. But those groups are so heterogeneous that it’s impossible to formulate a strategy that will appeal to all of them. As a guide to campaign strategy, saying “appeal to independent voters” is about as useful as saying “appeal to voters”. It’s true, but it doesn’t offer useful guidance on what you should actually do or say.
The group of voters who actually hold positions on most important issues which are about midway between the normative Democratic and Republican positions is nowhere near as large as the groups self-identifying as moderates or independents.
I think some people just vote on how they “feel” about the current state of the country. I know some people that voted for Obama in 2008 and John Kerry in 2004. And they voted for Trump in 2016. I think these “moderates” are “right track/wrong track” voters. If they sense that the country is going wrong-track, they vote for the person who they think is likely to do a course correction, regardless of that person’s stance on certain issues. As much as I disagreed, these people seemed to swing toward Trump in 2016, because he represented a change from the status-quo that they identified as wrong track.
I think the issue is that most people aren’t ideologically pure, by the standards of either party. For example, it’s entirely possible in the real world to be firmly for the space program, a muscular foreign policy, a big military, and also be for equality, tolerance, diversity and environmental preservation. Or pro-choice and anti-gay marriage, for example.
So when these people are looking for who to vote for, they may have something of an ideological bent, but they’re not at all all-in on either party. So they tend to vote for the candidate who sounds like they’re best on what they personally perceive to be the issues facing their city/county/state/nation at that time. They’re not voting for a party platform, they’re not voting for the long haul to get a slate of issues enacted, they’re voting more immediate- if the city has problems with crime, they’re voting for the more law-and-order mayoral candidate. If the country’s facing economic issues they’ll vote for the guy that they perceive as offering the best remedy.
I wouldn’t say they’re low information voters- far from it. They’re something else- low allegiance(?) maybe?
And I want to point out that in the posted 538 article, it would have been very enlightening to show those scatterplots with non-moderate Democrat and Republicans also plotted; I suspect that the moderates/independents/undecideds would have looked far more moderate by comparison than they do how they’re currently portrayed in that article.
Well, moderates are certainly more heterogenous. I’m sure a similar plot would show most self-identifed liberals clustered in the economically/socially liberal quadrant and most self-identified conservatives in the economically/socially conservative quadrant. But there are still large numbers of people who are way far to the left or right on both measures who think of themselves as “moderates”, so the label is much less useful than “liberal” or “conservative” as far as allowing you to reasonably guess what positions someone actually holds.
The last French election boasted at least four major parties that billed themselves as “neither left nor right but X”, including the one that won (which, admittedly, is really “neither left nor right but *really *right but at least we’re not The Fash but more and more The Fash adjacent”).
As for “if only more moderate centrists…”, I’m genuinely struggling to imagine a candidate that’d be more milquetoasty, bland and inoffensive than the current crop of Democratic presidential hopefuls - or Obama for that matter. Except for Bernie, who often actually sets foot in the vicinity of what “the Left” means anywhere outside the US.
I think this is a very interesting topic, and relates to several issues that I personally find confusing about what factors determine who wins presidential elections. Here are some of my observations, which I’m sure also have some flaws. If so, please feel free to point out where my observations are flawed or irrelevant.
Regarding moderates, centrists, and independents, it seems that there is a contingent of voters who seem to never be satisfied. There were 20 candidates at one point in this cycle for the Democratic nomination, and IIRC there were 16 major candidates for the Republican nomination at the high number mark in 2016. None the less, there were in both cases some supposedly “moderate”, “centrist”, or “independent” voters who could not find anyone they liked in these large fields. This seems to agree with what 538 reports that there is no one group of moderate or centrist voters who can be won over by a centrist candidate.
Regarding the idea of voting for a candidate that “I’d like to have a beer with” it does seem to me that going back to at least Carter’s victory over Ford in 1976 that the more charismatic candidate has always won the election. This seems to imply that moderates / centrists do care more about style and personality than the actual policy positions of the candidates. One alternate explanation is that the people on the far left or far right are only inspired to come out by a charismatic candidate (Obama, Bill Clinton, Bush Jr, Trump) and end up staying home for someone who is is seen as boring or vanilla (Kerry, Romney, Dole, Hillary Clinton).
Kind of seems you set up a strawman argument then knocked it down, to be honest. Most people who feel there is a large group of voters in the middle don’t say anything like ‘voters who feel that both major parties are too extreme and are looking for a “centrist” alternative’. Instead, there is a large group of voters who aren’t part of the extreme views of the left or right across the board. I’d say that’s not exactly a myth. As for winning, again, that’s not a myth…it’s pretty apparent that, usually, candidates run in the primaries by pandering to the left or right and then, in the general run to the center. Nothing mythological about that.
What’s bullshit is the strawman argument. As for a ‘centrist alternative’, well, generally that’s the candidate from one party or the other who most closely aligns with the center, at least in the general election. There IS no real centrist party (or, more accurately, both parties accommodate, to some degree, centrist positions), so centrist voters vote Democrat or Republican, as our system is the big tent system…you pick the least odious of the alternatives or the one who most closely aligns on the most issues with your other stance.
BTW, just because someone is ‘centrist’ doesn’t mean they don’t lean left or right on some, maybe on several issues. I consider myself a centrist (and I’m no myth :p), but on many issues I’m left leaning, while on some I lean more towards the right…and this is key…WRT the US political center. Something that, itself, shifts over time.
I think this demonstrates a misunderstanding of what centrist and independent even are wrt our political system.
Seems like a “centrist” would have to be someone who takes a moderate position on most issues. These are rare. People like you, who lean left on issue A and right on issue B, are much more common. But I have no interest in debating the meaning of “centrist”.
The study I linked to describes the beliefs of people who identify* themselves* as moderates and/or independents. So, if there’s a misunderstanding of what those terms mean, it’s on the part of the people who embrace those labels.
I think you are mistaken. There is a new dichotomy developing where it seems that the lines are clearly drawn. You must be on one side or the other, so people remain distant from discussion. A socially liberal Republican, a fiscally conservative Democrat, there is no place in the political talk for either.
We MUST be on one side of an issue or the other, or be shouted down, so silence becomes the norm. There can be no discussion, no middle. And so productive debate cannot happen.
The Silent Majority, to use a damaged term from the Reagan Era. I think is it out there. You can only appeal to special, narrow, interest groups for so long. People tend to vote with their check book, and invest in new ideas only when it suits them.
And it’s ridiculous to claim that that argument is a “strawman” that nobody actually makes. The very first paragraph of the link in the OP includes links to multiple opinion pieces from, among other places, the NY times and WSJ making exactly that argument. It comes up in every single thread on this board discussing the current primaries.
I’m really not sure what your position is. Are you claiming that parties should try to find policies and candidates that appeal to “moderate independents?” If so, why are you describing your own position as a “bullshit strawman argment”? If not, what exactly are you disagreeing with?
ETA: That was to XT; thanks to Yankees for ninjaing me in order to demonstrate my point!