"The Moderate Middle Is A Myth" [View all]

[Garrett78]

I've posted this here, but the following article deserves its own thread: "The Moderate Middle Is A Myth"

As the above link makes clear, self-identified "moderates," "independents" and "undecideds" are all over the map ideologically-speaking. And studies show that virtually all of today's so-called "independents" are very partisan but claim they hate partisanship. In fact, they're more likely to always be straight-ticket voters than the average party-affiliated voter of past decades. True swing voters are not that great in number, and it's a myth that they constitute some mass of ideologically-similar middle-of-the-roaders who will vote for whichever candidate is closer to the center. A lot of people and members of the media have become invested in that narrative and will undoubtedly dispute these findings (mostly with anecdotes and 'gut feelings' and tweets), but it just ain't the case. Anyway, here's a couple of key excerpts from the 538 piece linked above:

The upshot of all this is that if you’re a campaign trying to appeal to independents, moderates or undecided voters — or a concerned citizen trying to make sense of these groups in the context of an election — policy and ideology aren’t good frames of reference. There just isn’t much in terms of policy or ideology that unites these groups.11

Anybody who claims to have the winning formula for winning moderate, independent or undecided voters is making things up. Perhaps more centrist policies will appeal to some voters in each of these categories — but so will more extreme policies.12

And come election day, these potential swing voters may not ultimately care all that much about policy. They don’t tend to identify themselves based on ideology, and they don’t follow politics all that closely.

First, this is a really small group — only 2.4 percent of the electorate falls in all three buckets. And even this super small middle of the middle is … you guessed it … all over the ideological map. Rare as these voters are, anybody who talks about winning over undecided, independent, moderate voters should first address the question: which undecided, independent, moderate voters?