Could have gone in either of two threads but I decided to create a third. For those of you who haven’t seen it, the Pew Political Typology is the Pew Research Institute’s effort at dividing the American public into nine groups based on differences in ideology, personality and political engagement. One of them, the Tuned-Out Middle, is defined by not voting much and being evenly divided when they do, so for practical purposes there are eight, three for each party and two swing groups.
The two groups of swing voters are very different; the Polite Right are economic conservatives/social moderates who strongly dislike politicians using rude or inflammatory language. They lean Republican but obviously aren’t big Trump fans. The Left-Out Left are cynical, disengaged progressives. They’ll always vote Democratic if they bother to vote at all, but need a highly charismatic candidate to keep them engaged.
The Democratic groups are basically Progressives, Liberals and Moderates (aka the “Order and Opportunity Left”. Note that there’s an interesting dichotomy here, in that both of the swing groups are potentially available to Democrats, but only one to Republicans. That suggests that the Democrats have two potential strategies available: nominating a moderate to try to peel off the Polite Right, or a progressive to appeal to the Left-Out Left. Ideally, they could hedge their bets with the other swing group by nominating a moderate with an edgy “outsider” persona (too bad Fetterman went crazy) or a dignified, no-nonsense progressive (too bad Bernie got old). Somewhat paradoxically, their worst option might be to nominate someone from the Liberal wing, who would be most broadly acceptable to their base but wouldn’t appeal to either swing group. So they’ll probably go with Harris-Newsom and blow it.
AOC seems like the obvious choice from the progressive wing. For the moderates, Josh Shapiro is appealing, but I think his extreme pro-Israel stance is a deal-breaker for Democratic primary voters. Maybe Beshear or Buttigieg, but they both lack any hint of edginess.
For the Republicans, what strikes me is that JD Vance just has no constituency. He’s too linked to Trump to appeal to the moderate Republicans, and the Republican base are all racists and/or Evangelicals, so a Catholic with an Asian wife isn’t going to thrill them. It seems like there should be a lane for a moderate “let’s go back to just doing tax cuts without the fascism” GOP candidate, but Trump has pretty effectively purged all their officeholders who could fill that role.* So maybe it will just be Vance and nobody really likes him and he loses by a landslide. Or somebody more linked to the evangelical base might challenge him (DeSantis? Tucker Carlson?)
*This could be just the break the Romney campaign has been waiting for!