I'm really puzzled by the theory here. The view that moderate canidates are more electable because voters are moderates on all issues is a strawman. The theory always was that individual voters have an eclectic set of views -- particularly on issues they have deeply thought about -- but they are all over the map and taking a position in the middle generates less opposition than taking an extreme position (basically because voters are risk adverse).
In other words the argument for moderation is basically the same as the argument that canidates should move to the center -- the center minimizes the distance (squared distance or other superliner measures move about where in the center a bit) to voters positions. That argument doesn't fit well with the idea that canidates should shift away to look more like voters in having unusual beliefs.
Isn't the problem with choosing to elevate heterodox candidates rather than actually moderating te national program, the one that you've raised in the past, which is that these heterodox candidates are less likely to be on board with the type of partisan hardball that the Democrats need to rebalance the playing field?
The idea that a single truly swing voter's vote hinges in any way on what sports teams trans girls play on is peak pundit nonsense.
Anyone that has a strong view on that and similar issues has chosen their side. The "shmoderate" being described also is, as Morris points out, not really a swing voter-- it's a Republican who wants to signal that they're a "free thinker" or whatever, but is otherwise not meaningfully distinguishable from MAGA. Think Bari Weiss.
Rather, the way to win those voters is probably to focus on delivering results that people can feel day to day. Which is easier said than done. Housing matters a whole lot, but you're not going to build all the housing that San Francisco or Seattle or LA need in a single political term (or, given procedural gridlock, a decade). So the politically correct approach is probably to pursue the big long-term goals when in power, and campaign on preserving those big long-term gains when running for office (e.g. Democrats tend to do quite well running against Republicans who promise to repeal the ACA, and Trump did quite well lying about the wonderful secret health care plan he was going to unveil), and hope that the public won't be fooled again when Republicans promise that this time, they'll actually come up with that magic elixir to improve upon Democrats' imperfect but highly successful programs, then come to power and reveal (again) that they have nothing resembling good policy ideas in any area.
The problem with the trans sports issue, specifically, is that it viscerally repels lots of voters who DON'T have "strong views" on that issue and are going completely off of reactive, Type One thinking. Swing voters as a group are politically disengaged, exceptionally ignorant about basic factual issues, and vibe-driven rather than policy-driven.
On some very basic level, yeah, vibes voters say they want to keep trans girls out of girls' sports. But vibes voters are also not all that inclined to vote, period. They do vote when they're angry about something, and that something is typically something happening to them. In 2024, it's that prices rose too much in 2021-2022. Trump's approval rating is in the toilet now because those same vibes voters bought into Trump's obvious lies about bringing down those prices. Yeah, on some high level, those voters probably heavily come down one way on trans issues. But that's different from trans issues actually moving those voters. If the economy sucks, those voters aren't gonna hold their nose and vote for the incumbent party because of it; if the economy is great, those voters aren't going to vote against it because of it either.
The issue people tend to run into around this is that they keep trying to treat this class of culture-war issue in a vacuum (i.e. "if the Democratic Party reversed its position on trans women in sports but ceteris paribus did everything else 100 percent identically, what would the effect be") instead of treating individual sub-issues as one tile of a broader mosaic that vibes voters (if we're lucky) glance briefly at. They're not holding a magnifying glass up to the individual pieces.
If that picture looks like "Democrats are culturally alien weirdos," it doesn't matter how well you justify the individual pieces. It's going to be a drag on election performance. You might well win anyway if the environment or the baseline trends are sufficiently favorable, but you will lose legislative seats at the margins.
Those voters are marginal. They're not voting on whether they perceive Democrats to be "culturally alien weirdos"; they're voting on how their pocketbook looks, or whether they feel safe outside or whatever. If their lives are basically fine, they're not gonna vote.
I think the unintended consequence of this post is that a lot of ppl are going to start saying "shmoderate" now because it's simply more fun to say! XD
Feel like the best way to frame this is to ignore the ideology aspect altogether because, actually, it’s a side issue.
A good candidate is pragmatic and focused on creating wins for their district, state and nation. And a good candidate is focused on local issues, avoiding national issues they have little or no control over.
Base ideology guides your choices but if you do two things, you maximize the sense to your voters that you work for them
But Congresspeople don't legislate about local issues. We're not electing them to coordinate road work on Mission Street. We have supervisors for that.
One of the problems with federalism is that it creates this persistent mismatch between what voters expect candidates to be focused on and what they are institutionally intended to be focused on. Congresspeople are supposed to represent the voice of their constituency on national issues. Pork-barreling is a bug, not a feature.
100% on pork barrel. But focusing more on local issues (or national ones that hit your constituents) is a great way to clear the losing ideological clutter from your campaign and messaging. It allows you to make smart choice about compromising with the opposite party or interparty bloc
Sure, I don't want to oversell the point here. Obviously Mary Peltola is going to be more focused on national fish-related issues than your average legislator. But I do not think candidates for Congress should be running based on claims that they are going to solve local issues that Congresspeople fundamentally do not have any role over. That's just a recipe for disappointment and disillusionment. Scott Wiener, Congressman, cannot solve San Francisco's housing crisis. At best he can try to raise the salience of pro-housing federal bills.
Most “national” issues are things congresspeople don’t actually have that much control over and aren’t relevant to their constituents. Keeping the conversation focused on your voters needs is more important than putting those needs into an idealogical label box
I know that third parties rarely succeed, but the moment seems right for one. Democrats aren’t competitive in much of the country. Another party could challenge in gerrymandered districts. We have a Democratic Party that is stuck in the 20th century. Republicans are stuck in the 19th. We need a movement that can throw off these shackles and start anew.
I love this article. I am a long-time supporter of No Labels, which helped create the Problem Solvers. The late Senator Lieberman, a co-chair of No Labels, defines Centrism in the opening chapter of his book The Centrist Solution. From his perspective, centrism is not an ideology; it is a process, and a person can be anywhere along the spectrum as long as they are willing to come to the center (the table) to solve problems in good faith. He points out that tend to be easier for moderates due to their temperament. And the Problem Solvers will point out that they have members further to the left or right. Jared Goldman was one of our No Labels leaders, and his retirement is a great loss. He's leaving because of the threats to his family. They have young children and spent last Thanksgiving in a hotel due to threats. Going against your party is dangerous, not just in terms of party leaders' punishment but also the public's. We must stand up for these people, not just for them but for America. Our Constitution requires all sides to work together; otherwise, we have destructive gridlock that everyone complains about, yet so many reinforce.
One way I distinguish a moderate from a base politician is that a moderate has some respect for the intellectual abilities of people who disagree with them whereas base politicians will say that anyone who disagrees with them has somehow been tricked by propaganda, usually billionaire-funded propaganda, funded by someone like George Soros or the Koch brothers.
A moderate admits their side loses elections because people disagree with them. A base politician says it's because of misinformation or "Fake News." At an extreme, a base politician says they only lost because of a stolen election, either through allowing non-citizens to vote if it's a Democratic win, or gerrymandering or voter suppression if it's a Republican win.
A moderate sees disagreement as the result of different values or (less often) people preferring different pathways to reaching the same policy goal. A base politician believes that people who disagree with them are racist + transphobic or communist, but most of all, ignorant and/or malevolent.
I happen to think that progressives are worse than MAGAs here, where progressives not only say that the people who disagree with them are the victims of malign trickery, but that the cultural issues that conservatives and center-right people care about are illegitimate.
It has been a mix over time. In hindsight, I wouldn't say I made great choices in every election but at least I tried to be balanced in my assessments. I struggled in the early 1970s with the platforms of both parties and felt I couldn't sign up for either in toto. In fact, I actually feel that I saw the seeds of what we see now in the extremes of both parties. However, having said all of this, I haven't voted for a Republican in either state or federal elections since 2016. I lived and worked in New York City from the late 1970s to the late 2010s, and to this day, as someone who worked in the financial industry and experienced Trump up close and personal for years, I have no idea how he was elected. In fact, my firm was royally sc**wed on two transactions. Most people simply point to the bankruptcies but the number of cramdowns and "restructurings" that occurred were numerous. I point this out because once the Republican Party became a cult and was totally in thrall to Trump, I could not cast my vote for a Republican, even when I wasn't overjoyed with the Democratic alternative. I live in CT, and while blue across the board, he has infected the Republican Party here to such an extent that it is unthinkable that I would vote Republican. So, now it is immensely disappointing to me that because of electoral politics and how primaries are run, I don't even know what being an independent/moderate/shmoderate voter is anymore.
I often rail against "Econ 101 brain", where people take the simplified models they learned in Econ 101 and use them to build a full mental worldview. Matt's befuddlement of why people don't like private equity companies is a version of this ("Why would people not like maximizing economic surplus?" Uh, the goal of the companies is to convert excess consumer surplus to producer/investor surplus. Why would consumers like that.)
This moderation debate seems like a version, "PoliSci 101 brain", where people learn about Black's Median Voter Theorem and convince themselves that the easiest way to win elections is to take the median voter +1's positions wholesale and they're guaranteed to win. But there's no one-dimensional median voter! Different voters could be the median depending on which candidates map to the electorate's bucket of semi-related political opinions.
Ok with "the easiest way to win elections is to take the median voter +1's positions wholesale". But cut out the "guaranteed to win" part--that's creating a straw man that sounds ridiculous, as nothing *guarantees* a win (e.g., there can be a wave election, an outside event scrambles voters' electoral priorities, etc.). The question is: does a certain issue position make a win *more likely*.
Here's an underrated difference between the a 'shmoderate' like Brian Fitzpatrick and a 'shmoderate' like Suozzi, Golden, etc. The former doesn't go on TV every week and slam the party he's part of. You never see Fitzpatrick on MSNBC complaining about the insane MAGA people in his party. At most, he might say something to the local news affiliates.
Now, I think it'd be likely good for the country if he did, but he actually understands his job as a Republican Congressperson isn't to do that.
The reason ironically why some Republican 'moderates' don't get the pushback Democratic moderates do outside of the general differences in the coalition is the Republican moderates don't seemingly spend most of their waking life complaining to reporters from Politico or Axios about how crazzzzzyyyyy their voters have gotten and being annoyed it's not 2005 anymore.
So, a MAGA voter in Fitzpatrick's district might be annoyed at his votes, but he doesn't seem like somebody working against Trump like a lot of moderates seem like they're working against what Democratic voters actually want.
Yeah, I've always seen this as an unfortunate result of the ideological breakdown in the US: a lot more people self identify as conservative than as liberal, so Dems have to win a higher share of self-identifying moderates (they can't split them 50-50) which means much more overt statements distancing themselves from the left partisan extreme.
I hope Matt (and all of us) can put the greater good before our egos and let the progressives call moderation whatever they want as long as they start doing it. Call it "Anti-Yglesianism". Call it "Neo-Stalinism", whatever. It's unfair but worth it. Forcing them to call it "moderation" forces them to publicly admit they were wrong, which makes them less likely to do it. I'd rather win elections!
I'm really puzzled by the theory here. The view that moderate canidates are more electable because voters are moderates on all issues is a strawman. The theory always was that individual voters have an eclectic set of views -- particularly on issues they have deeply thought about -- but they are all over the map and taking a position in the middle generates less opposition than taking an extreme position (basically because voters are risk adverse).
In other words the argument for moderation is basically the same as the argument that canidates should move to the center -- the center minimizes the distance (squared distance or other superliner measures move about where in the center a bit) to voters positions. That argument doesn't fit well with the idea that canidates should shift away to look more like voters in having unusual beliefs.
Isn't the problem with choosing to elevate heterodox candidates rather than actually moderating te national program, the one that you've raised in the past, which is that these heterodox candidates are less likely to be on board with the type of partisan hardball that the Democrats need to rebalance the playing field?
The idea that a single truly swing voter's vote hinges in any way on what sports teams trans girls play on is peak pundit nonsense.
Anyone that has a strong view on that and similar issues has chosen their side. The "shmoderate" being described also is, as Morris points out, not really a swing voter-- it's a Republican who wants to signal that they're a "free thinker" or whatever, but is otherwise not meaningfully distinguishable from MAGA. Think Bari Weiss.
Rather, the way to win those voters is probably to focus on delivering results that people can feel day to day. Which is easier said than done. Housing matters a whole lot, but you're not going to build all the housing that San Francisco or Seattle or LA need in a single political term (or, given procedural gridlock, a decade). So the politically correct approach is probably to pursue the big long-term goals when in power, and campaign on preserving those big long-term gains when running for office (e.g. Democrats tend to do quite well running against Republicans who promise to repeal the ACA, and Trump did quite well lying about the wonderful secret health care plan he was going to unveil), and hope that the public won't be fooled again when Republicans promise that this time, they'll actually come up with that magic elixir to improve upon Democrats' imperfect but highly successful programs, then come to power and reveal (again) that they have nothing resembling good policy ideas in any area.
The problem with the trans sports issue, specifically, is that it viscerally repels lots of voters who DON'T have "strong views" on that issue and are going completely off of reactive, Type One thinking. Swing voters as a group are politically disengaged, exceptionally ignorant about basic factual issues, and vibe-driven rather than policy-driven.
On some very basic level, yeah, vibes voters say they want to keep trans girls out of girls' sports. But vibes voters are also not all that inclined to vote, period. They do vote when they're angry about something, and that something is typically something happening to them. In 2024, it's that prices rose too much in 2021-2022. Trump's approval rating is in the toilet now because those same vibes voters bought into Trump's obvious lies about bringing down those prices. Yeah, on some high level, those voters probably heavily come down one way on trans issues. But that's different from trans issues actually moving those voters. If the economy sucks, those voters aren't gonna hold their nose and vote for the incumbent party because of it; if the economy is great, those voters aren't going to vote against it because of it either.
The issue people tend to run into around this is that they keep trying to treat this class of culture-war issue in a vacuum (i.e. "if the Democratic Party reversed its position on trans women in sports but ceteris paribus did everything else 100 percent identically, what would the effect be") instead of treating individual sub-issues as one tile of a broader mosaic that vibes voters (if we're lucky) glance briefly at. They're not holding a magnifying glass up to the individual pieces.
If that picture looks like "Democrats are culturally alien weirdos," it doesn't matter how well you justify the individual pieces. It's going to be a drag on election performance. You might well win anyway if the environment or the baseline trends are sufficiently favorable, but you will lose legislative seats at the margins.
Those voters are marginal. They're not voting on whether they perceive Democrats to be "culturally alien weirdos"; they're voting on how their pocketbook looks, or whether they feel safe outside or whatever. If their lives are basically fine, they're not gonna vote.
I just want to know when Matt is going to run the article criticizing Democrats for running extremists in the Michigan and Maine Senate races.
Democrats should loudly declare that not just "blue" and "red" are artificial categories holding us back, so are "left" and "right."
I think the unintended consequence of this post is that a lot of ppl are going to start saying "shmoderate" now because it's simply more fun to say! XD
Feel like the best way to frame this is to ignore the ideology aspect altogether because, actually, it’s a side issue.
A good candidate is pragmatic and focused on creating wins for their district, state and nation. And a good candidate is focused on local issues, avoiding national issues they have little or no control over.
Base ideology guides your choices but if you do two things, you maximize the sense to your voters that you work for them
But Congresspeople don't legislate about local issues. We're not electing them to coordinate road work on Mission Street. We have supervisors for that.
One of the problems with federalism is that it creates this persistent mismatch between what voters expect candidates to be focused on and what they are institutionally intended to be focused on. Congresspeople are supposed to represent the voice of their constituency on national issues. Pork-barreling is a bug, not a feature.
100% on pork barrel. But focusing more on local issues (or national ones that hit your constituents) is a great way to clear the losing ideological clutter from your campaign and messaging. It allows you to make smart choice about compromising with the opposite party or interparty bloc
Sure, I don't want to oversell the point here. Obviously Mary Peltola is going to be more focused on national fish-related issues than your average legislator. But I do not think candidates for Congress should be running based on claims that they are going to solve local issues that Congresspeople fundamentally do not have any role over. That's just a recipe for disappointment and disillusionment. Scott Wiener, Congressman, cannot solve San Francisco's housing crisis. At best he can try to raise the salience of pro-housing federal bills.
Most “national” issues are things congresspeople don’t actually have that much control over and aren’t relevant to their constituents. Keeping the conversation focused on your voters needs is more important than putting those needs into an idealogical label box
I know that third parties rarely succeed, but the moment seems right for one. Democrats aren’t competitive in much of the country. Another party could challenge in gerrymandered districts. We have a Democratic Party that is stuck in the 20th century. Republicans are stuck in the 19th. We need a movement that can throw off these shackles and start anew.
I love this article. I am a long-time supporter of No Labels, which helped create the Problem Solvers. The late Senator Lieberman, a co-chair of No Labels, defines Centrism in the opening chapter of his book The Centrist Solution. From his perspective, centrism is not an ideology; it is a process, and a person can be anywhere along the spectrum as long as they are willing to come to the center (the table) to solve problems in good faith. He points out that tend to be easier for moderates due to their temperament. And the Problem Solvers will point out that they have members further to the left or right. Jared Goldman was one of our No Labels leaders, and his retirement is a great loss. He's leaving because of the threats to his family. They have young children and spent last Thanksgiving in a hotel due to threats. Going against your party is dangerous, not just in terms of party leaders' punishment but also the public's. We must stand up for these people, not just for them but for America. Our Constitution requires all sides to work together; otherwise, we have destructive gridlock that everyone complains about, yet so many reinforce.
One way I distinguish a moderate from a base politician is that a moderate has some respect for the intellectual abilities of people who disagree with them whereas base politicians will say that anyone who disagrees with them has somehow been tricked by propaganda, usually billionaire-funded propaganda, funded by someone like George Soros or the Koch brothers.
A moderate admits their side loses elections because people disagree with them. A base politician says it's because of misinformation or "Fake News." At an extreme, a base politician says they only lost because of a stolen election, either through allowing non-citizens to vote if it's a Democratic win, or gerrymandering or voter suppression if it's a Republican win.
A moderate sees disagreement as the result of different values or (less often) people preferring different pathways to reaching the same policy goal. A base politician believes that people who disagree with them are racist + transphobic or communist, but most of all, ignorant and/or malevolent.
I happen to think that progressives are worse than MAGAs here, where progressives not only say that the people who disagree with them are the victims of malign trickery, but that the cultural issues that conservatives and center-right people care about are illegitimate.
It has been a mix over time. In hindsight, I wouldn't say I made great choices in every election but at least I tried to be balanced in my assessments. I struggled in the early 1970s with the platforms of both parties and felt I couldn't sign up for either in toto. In fact, I actually feel that I saw the seeds of what we see now in the extremes of both parties. However, having said all of this, I haven't voted for a Republican in either state or federal elections since 2016. I lived and worked in New York City from the late 1970s to the late 2010s, and to this day, as someone who worked in the financial industry and experienced Trump up close and personal for years, I have no idea how he was elected. In fact, my firm was royally sc**wed on two transactions. Most people simply point to the bankruptcies but the number of cramdowns and "restructurings" that occurred were numerous. I point this out because once the Republican Party became a cult and was totally in thrall to Trump, I could not cast my vote for a Republican, even when I wasn't overjoyed with the Democratic alternative. I live in CT, and while blue across the board, he has infected the Republican Party here to such an extent that it is unthinkable that I would vote Republican. So, now it is immensely disappointing to me that because of electoral politics and how primaries are run, I don't even know what being an independent/moderate/shmoderate voter is anymore.
Matt,
“But what distinguishes a closeted, Trump-disapproving Republican from a normal one?“
The answer is in the article you linked: mostly it just depends on how much you care about prices
I often rail against "Econ 101 brain", where people take the simplified models they learned in Econ 101 and use them to build a full mental worldview. Matt's befuddlement of why people don't like private equity companies is a version of this ("Why would people not like maximizing economic surplus?" Uh, the goal of the companies is to convert excess consumer surplus to producer/investor surplus. Why would consumers like that.)
This moderation debate seems like a version, "PoliSci 101 brain", where people learn about Black's Median Voter Theorem and convince themselves that the easiest way to win elections is to take the median voter +1's positions wholesale and they're guaranteed to win. But there's no one-dimensional median voter! Different voters could be the median depending on which candidates map to the electorate's bucket of semi-related political opinions.
Ok with "the easiest way to win elections is to take the median voter +1's positions wholesale". But cut out the "guaranteed to win" part--that's creating a straw man that sounds ridiculous, as nothing *guarantees* a win (e.g., there can be a wave election, an outside event scrambles voters' electoral priorities, etc.). The question is: does a certain issue position make a win *more likely*.
I regret I have but 1 like to give this comment.
I'm definitely going to steal that 2nd paragraph
Here's an underrated difference between the a 'shmoderate' like Brian Fitzpatrick and a 'shmoderate' like Suozzi, Golden, etc. The former doesn't go on TV every week and slam the party he's part of. You never see Fitzpatrick on MSNBC complaining about the insane MAGA people in his party. At most, he might say something to the local news affiliates.
Now, I think it'd be likely good for the country if he did, but he actually understands his job as a Republican Congressperson isn't to do that.
The reason ironically why some Republican 'moderates' don't get the pushback Democratic moderates do outside of the general differences in the coalition is the Republican moderates don't seemingly spend most of their waking life complaining to reporters from Politico or Axios about how crazzzzzyyyyy their voters have gotten and being annoyed it's not 2005 anymore.
So, a MAGA voter in Fitzpatrick's district might be annoyed at his votes, but he doesn't seem like somebody working against Trump like a lot of moderates seem like they're working against what Democratic voters actually want.
Yeah, I've always seen this as an unfortunate result of the ideological breakdown in the US: a lot more people self identify as conservative than as liberal, so Dems have to win a higher share of self-identifying moderates (they can't split them 50-50) which means much more overt statements distancing themselves from the left partisan extreme.
I am very sad Progressives chased Jared Golden out of Congress. I did not agree with Golden on a ton but I respected him
People keep saying this and I keep asking for any evidence that it actually happened and getting none.
I hope Matt (and all of us) can put the greater good before our egos and let the progressives call moderation whatever they want as long as they start doing it. Call it "Anti-Yglesianism". Call it "Neo-Stalinism", whatever. It's unfair but worth it. Forcing them to call it "moderation" forces them to publicly admit they were wrong, which makes them less likely to do it. I'd rather win elections!