I don’t think there’s a “moderate” middle, but there is a large swath of people that barely care and don’t pay much attention, and rarely vote. When they do vote, they tend to go by their gut and usually vote for whoever they think could actually fix all the stuff they see as broken.
I don’t think the clustering is the point at all. It’s immaterial if the moderates cluster in one group. What is important is what the nature of “moderate” beliefs are.
The usual belief is that moderates are people who hold less extreme versions of beliefs. They are, in effect, in the middle. But that doesn’t align with the actual data. The actual data shows that moderates are most often either people who have no real position at all on issues, or who have some positions from both sides.
Neither of these groups responds well to the usual moderate push, which is to water down more extreme positions. One group isn’t paying attention to the positions at all, and the other consists of people who actually support more extreme positions and are turned off by watering them down.
It makes sense: instead of trying to appeal to some mythical moderate, pick the issues that both moderates and your extreme care about, and push those. Don’t try to appeal to some hypothetical person “in the middle.”
No one is arguing that moderates can be ignored. Just that conventional strategy won’t work.
I’d even add an additional strategy of trying to appeal to low-information voters. I’ve seen more of that on the right than the left. Or, at least, the left seems to think the solution is to give more information. But if they are low information by choice, that won’t work. The right is better at giving simplistic reasons so that low-information voters can stay low information yet vote Republican.
As much as the left mocks them, we need those bumper sticker slogans. We just need to make sure there is meat to back them up so that the higher information voters don’t get turned off by it.
It’s why I think having a very charismatic candidate is so important. That is one thing that appeals to low-information voters. And, as I’ve said, they’ve always won in my life time. (Trump may not be charismatic to you or me, but he was to a good portion of the electorate, while Clinton wasn’t charismatic even to her supporters.) Charisma inspires passion, and passion is what gets votes.
BigT’s post is very informative in its entirety, but I want to comment on the part I’ve reddened (a point I tried to make here several months ago).
With only two possible exceptions the more charismatic candidate has won every Presidential election of my lifetime. (The possible exceptions were non-charismatic Nixon beating non-charismatic Humphrey, and the defeat of the charismatic Goldwater.)
But what prescription does this provide us for the present election? The only Democratic candidate with outstanding charisma is … Bernie Sanders! :eek:
If Trump is “charismatic” then I just don’t understand charisma. Trump is only appealing if you’re an idiot and a conspiracy theorist. I watch him speak and every word is a lie, or bashing someone undeservedly, or just transparently stupid.
Out of the democratic candidates, Pete G strikes me as extremely charismatic. Kamala too, as long as she stays out of angry mode. Warren is charismatic, but more like a teacher than a leader. Much of her charisma relies on her wit.
But again, I may be the wrong person to judge.
Trump wasn’t charismatic in the Obama way. Well spoken, attractive etx
He reached to those who wanted real change in the Oval Office, Politics as usual was and likely still is seen as a bad bad thing.
People do want change, they bought the hope and change rhetoric that Obama sold them. But they do see politicians as the swamp and lots and lots of folks want that swamp drained.
And they probably still feel this way, but will they fall for the con again? Do they still think Trump or someone like him is their savior from the elitist swamp government? Apparently based on polls, most of them do.
I would not be a good judge of how far is too far for that bridge but a lot of them likely do see the things Trump does as sticks in the eye of the establishment politicians.
Although I follow American politics, I only have real experience with Canada.
In Canada, all of the political parties are basically moderate. Certainly the Liberals and Conservatives. The “socialist” New Democrat Party has an international left-wing rating of 3 out of 8 (extreme). The recent PPC is not included and it’s future may be uncertain. Most Canadians are not partisan, although the number of partisans is said to have recently doubled.
Vermont, Maine, Montana and Minnesota don’t seem terribly removed from Canada to me.
More extreme views get all the airtime; suck up all the oxygen. A person can be moderate but still support climate issues or have some Catholic beliefs or want a strong military — being “extreme on one issue”, however defined, hardly means moderate majority is a myth. Is it true most people really don’t have some friends who are and aren’t Trump supporters? Even I do, and Trump is only popular with 10% of Canucks.
Having read the 538 article, it basically says some people who are non-partisan use labels like moderate, independent, both, etc. People who self- identify as moderate have various views about immigration and redistribution (an egalitarian vs. Market orientation).
I don’t see this as that surprising. Since there are many other issues, and since parties are adopting harder views on issues which may not be purely political (e.g. climate change)… it is not surprising people may describe themselves as independent compared to a party consensus. I don’t see why you can’t be moderate if you support a somewhat winged approach on one issue, for most issues.
They absolutely do. I have no idea how he managed it, but a real-estate billionaire from New fucking York with business contracts all over the world managed to sell himself as a “man of the people” and “against globalists”. The most hilarious (or discouraging, depending) thing is that Trump told them to their faces that “drain the swamp” was empty bullshit he only says because it gets applause.
Shit’s wild, man.
I read a reddit comment about brexit talking about this kind of thing and the commenter made a really good point: Disenfranchised people were basically just thrilled that got to vote against the system on the ballot, and they don’t actually care if this saves them from getting fucked over by the establishment. They think they’re getting fucked either way, so they want someone who in their minds is going to punish the people who have been screwing them over. Unfortunately I think if this mindset is prevalent, no one will ever convince these angry voters by arguing that their preferred issue/candidate is going to be really bad for the country because psychologically that’s the entire point.
Two seemingly contradictory ideas are true:
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It is correct to think there is a myth of the moderate middle as described in the OP link.
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Moderate candidates are more likely to win.
How this can be is explained in my next link, one which is IMHO even more important than the OP:
Candidate Ideology and Turning Out the Base
Here’s how I see the dynamic explained in my link working.
Suppose Trump is the GOP nominee. He’s perceived as too extreme, so many people who are vaguely on the left, but often don’t bother to vote, will think November 2020 is one of the few elections really worth voting in. This doesn’t prove Trump can’t win, but it makes him a weak nominee (as he was when he lost the popular vote in 2016).
But suppose Pence is the GOP nominee. High information left-leaning voters may see him as worse than Trump, but almost all of those were going to vote Democratic anyway.
What about the lazy, vaguely on the left voters? They would perceive Pence, because of his lower-temperature aura, as being not nearly as bad as Trump. Many would then decide they had something better to do than voting. This makes Pence a strong candidate.
I think the same dynamic makes Biden a stronger candidate than Warren. Lazy FoxNews watchers would go out in the rain to stop Warren but not Biden. The strongest Democratic nominee would be a boring unknown moderate like, oh, Senator Michael Bennet.
You are only looking at one side of the equation. Sure there’s an oppositional hype factor, but there’s also a turning out the base factor. For every moderate voter who stays home because they don’t feel motivated to vote against a particular candidate, there is someone more on the fringe who thinks “meh, Clinton and Trump are just two sides of the same problem” and doesn’t feel motivated to vote because they don’t feel either represents them. You think Bernie/Warren voters are gonna be jazzed about voting for Biden? He will turn out less of the democratic base than they would IMO.
If I understand my link correctly, the ratio is more like three-to-one than the one-to-one you quote (page 13).
Now, that’s for congressional elections. Someone can always say that presidential elections are different, and, due to the small sample size, I can’t refute it, even though I don’t buy it.
What I may buy is that, as a former Republican, and self-appointed savior of capitalism, Elizabeth Warren is in better position than some think to convince lazy right-of-center types that she isn’t all that scary. Given his Trotskyite history (ran for Socialist Workers Party presidential elector at age 39), I question whether Sanders could, or even would try to, similarly pivot.