I found Kevin Drum’s recent post thought-provoking. He opens by advising Democrats to take the “median voter theorem” seriously and closes by asking why progressives aren’t faring better:
Life should be good for liberals right now. The Republican Party has gone insane and is led by a guy who makes Ted Cruz look like George Washington. We should be kicking their asses all over the place. But we’re not. We’ve tossed away the chance of a lifetime.
Figuring out what our problem is requires lots of dispassionate, clear-eyed thinking in response to a simple question: What is it about us that scares so many people? I sure wish that weren’t in such short supply.
Let’s start with the median voter theorem. It was proposed about 70 years ago and the short version of it is that the candidate whose views most closely approximate those of the median voter tends to win elections. This diagram can explain why that might be:
By Colin.champion Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
Kevin sees it slightly differently:
I’ve always thought it’s the other way around: we vote more against the party (or candidate) we hate rather than for the party we like. The median voter theorem still holds, but my version tells us that the losing candidate is the one who’s closest to what the median voter hates.
From which he concludes and I hope I’m misinterpreting him here, that Democratic politicians need to do a more effective job of making voters hate Republicans. That’s pretty consistent with the assertion frequently heard that Democrats have a messaging problem.
I, on the contrary, go along with Napoleon. There are only two great motivators, fear of loss and hope of gain, and Democratic politicians in the policies that they advocate are doing too effective a job at making the median voter fear what they intend to do and little job at all of convincing the median voter that they have something to gain by supporting them. It might help if they weren’t quite so transparent in showing that they themselves gain by what they advocate while showing little inclination to abide by the restrictions they would impose on others, cf. Nancy Pelosi’s recent remarks about members of Congress buying and selling stock and the frequently observed violation of mask mandates by Democratic politicians. They don’t have a messaging problem; they have policy and behavior problems.
There’s another related hypothesis called “Hotelling’s principle of minimum differentiation” which can be summarized as politicians tend to drift to the position of the median voter. I think that hypothesis has broken down completely, largely on the basis of the fabulous amount of money spent in national campaigns and the psychology of major donors. Rather than moderating their views, politicians are drifting ever farther to the extremes. Let’s return to the diagram above. What if, rather than three candidates there are just two and, while the views of voters are dispersed across the spectrum, the two candidates occupy opposite poles? IMO that describes our present situation pretty succinctly.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qow3lo9QmU
I viewed this Utube piece yesterday, starring Isaiah Carter, who describes himself as part of the working class – a Biden voter in 2020. He clearly lists what has turned him into someone now “disgusted†with both Biden and Harris – “genderism,†the Afghan withdrawal travesty, CRT in Schools, and the COVID enforcement tactics. In his own words Dems are “going in the wrong direction,†and “have fallen away from the common man.â€
IMO Carter’s plain spoken comments speak for many, on all sides of the political divide. However, I don’t think capturing what is going on with him or others in this country can be sufficiently framed in a “median voter model.†Instead, the general distress, expressed by “the common man,†is their growing awareness how disloyal the government in power has become in representing the peoples’ needs and desires. Rather than having a hatred for the governing party they have developed no respect or tolerance for the rules, dictatorial behavior, and laws being laid out by them, and this is what is propelling them to go elsewhere with their allegiance and possibly their vote.
When someone writes an appalling lie like this, “The Republican Party has gone insane and is led by a guy who makes Ted Cruz look like George Washington,” he is not a serious political commentator. He is a shill.
Nonetheless, the median voter theorem makes a kind of sense. However, I agree with you that median candidates are scarce on the ground. One would think Joe Manchin was the median Democrat, but relative to AOC et al., he is extreme right. In the day of JFK, Manchin would be median, and AOC wouldn’t be in Congress, even if she did exist.
The idea that people are often voting against something or someone and not necessarily for someone makes a lot of sense.
Steve