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President Donald Trump has brought American democracy close to collapse. But Democrats shouldn’t soften their stance on any matter, with the intention of weakening him.
This pairing of positions is widespread among progressives, in spite of their perceived contradiction.
As Ezra Klein, a Vox co-creator and New York Times columnist, argued recently, many of those most concerned about Trump “don’t welcome what I believe logically follows from that concern, which is the readiness to make tactical and political choices you find individually off-putting, even though they are apparently more liable to aid you in prevailing.”
Klein’s view is fairly easy to understand. Political practicality and unwavering ideological views will always involve give and take. Less regard paid to public sentiment translates to greater possibility of losing at the polls. If failure to secure the next two federal election cycles would put democracy in grave danger, then choosing a more conservative ideological approach looks wise.
More directly, to impede Trump from further firming up his authority over the judicial branch, Democrats will be required to attain a Senate majority in the coming year. And achieving this will probably demand, among other considerations, prevailing in statewide contests in North Carolina, Ohio, and Iowa — all states that favored Trump three times, the latter two by significant margins in 2024. For the Democratic Party to be more acceptable in those areas, it could potentially mean adopting more conservative stances on issues.
Progressives offer different responses to this line of reasoning. But the most well thought-out comes from political researchers Jake Grumbach and Adam Bonica. According to their account, there is no paradox in opposing Republican authoritarianism while favoring no Democratic moderation — since the latter, in reality, brings about no meaningful political rewards.
Grumbach and Bonica have championed this argument in a collection of pieces and essays (one of which I’ve looked into previously). But their most notable intervention came last month, in a Substack article titled “Do Moderates Fare Better?” In that piece, the political experts advance two central assertions:
- The perceived link between moderation and electoral results in House races stems from skewed methodologies. By properly accounting for structural components, moderate contenders did not achieve markedly superior results than progressive ones in 2024.
- Regardless, correlation isn’t synonymous with causation. And through the application of advanced statistical approaches to pinpoint the causal effect of moderation on Democratic House candidates’ proportion of votes, it becomes clear that the benefits are either minimal or nonexistent.
Other political data specialists have challenged Bonica and Grumbach’s pronouncements. Statistician Nate Silver argues that they utilize a shaky measure of candidate ideology and minimize the advantages of moderation in their paradigms. Pollster Lakshya Jain asserts that Bonica and Grumbach significantly underestimate the association between moderation and electoral triumph by disregarding a broadly accepted rule of thumb in political research.
I haven’t taken a math course since I was 18 years of age, so I can’t comment with great authority regarding these quants’ methodological disagreements. Instead, I plan to place emphasis on a wide-ranging point: Even if Bonica and Grumbach’s factual findings are fully precise, they do not actually demonstrate what they profess.
To be exact, the political researchers imply that Democrats have hardly anything to gain from tempering their stances on a national level. But their conclusions don’t corroborate this idea — and their own theoretical points actually throw it into doubt.
This story was first featured in The Rebuild.
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Why being moderate might not be as rewarding as it once was
Bonica and Grumbach offer a theory as to why moderation isn’t advantageous in House races anymore. They state:
Decades prior when “all politics was local,” a candidate’s inclination toward moderation likely presented significant advantages. However, in the Trump political era, elections are propelled by nationwide trends, candidate charisma, along with anti-establishment credibility—attributes that neither political consultants nor academics understand how to artificially create.
It should be mentioned that Grumbach and Bonica exhibit a specific necessity for precision at this point. When it comes to moderation, they emphasize that association doesn’t equal causation: Even if moderate candidates managed to outperform progressive ones in House races, as they assert, that wouldn’t automatically prove that centrism is beneficial. After all, moderate candidates may typically possess other key advantages, unrelated to their ideology. Hence, from Bonica and Grumbach’s perspective, before anyone asserts that moderation is useful, they have to undertake thorough statistical evaluations, utilizing advanced scientific techniques.
Nevertheless, directly after arguing this point, the political researchers have no problem stating that “anti-establishment credibility” spurs electoral success in the Trump era. This seems illogical, because Bonica and Grumbach present no proof that such credibility even relates to improved results, let alone that it brings them about.
Putting this aside, one facet of Grumbach and Bonica’s theory makes good sense: Without a doubt, politics has grown more “nationalized” over the past three decades. Due to the growth of cable and the internet, local papers and TV channels have gradually lost influence to nationwide media outlets.
This results in voters assessing House races through the perspective of national politics — which in turn diminishes the advantages of moderation lower down the ballot: A local newspaper will devote a large portion of its attention to a region’s Democratic congressional candidate, along with any particular policy positions that she might espouse. TikTok and Fox News, however, have a tendency to focus attention on the Democratic Party’s national image, which is shaped by its leadership along with its highest-profile members (it’s practically certain that voters in rural Ohio are more familiar with Zohran Mamdani than their area’s Democratic House contenders).
Therefore, down-ballot Democrats are not as capable of setting themselves apart from their party in this day and age. They may embrace unorthodox views that are favored in their district. But voters won’t automatically learn about those opinions, much less consider them more strongly than their sentiments toward Democrats as a whole.
Therefore, it’s quite likely that House and Senate hopefuls stand to gain less from moderation currently than they did historically. In theory, it is even conceivable that the benefits of moderation down-ballot have basically disappeared, as Bonica and Grumbach claim.
However, even if we accept that they are correct on this point, their core conclusion — that moderation would not be beneficial to Democrats at a national level — still doesn’t hold up.
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- A dangerous new theory about what Democrats are doing wrong
A national party adopting unorthodox views and an individual House candidate doing so are two very different things
The controversy regarding whether Democrats would benefit from moderation largely revolves around national politics. For many, the most vital question is: Would our party secure more elections if its current congressional leaders — and/or 2028 presidential nominee — took on more centrist positions on noteworthy topics?
And yet, when political experts take part in this debate, they tend to do so by inspecting what takes place when standard House candidates move to the center.
This approach is easy to understand. Every couple of years, 435 House elections occur, showcasing a broad array of Democratic candidates. This produces enough data points to develop statistically noteworthy connections between ideology and how well a candidate performs.
On the other hand, there have only been 20 presidential elections since World War II. It isn’t possible to create a solid statistical evaluation from the observation that Democrats did fairly well after moderating in 1996 (nor from the fact that Republicans built support while leaning more ideologically toward the extreme in 1980). Therefore, there may not be a better approach to empirically assess theories of electability than to closely examine House results.
But such results can only reveal so much to us.
A national political party embracing a more moderate agenda and an individual House candidate doing so are entirely distinct occurrences. And there’s no cause to believe that the political ramifications of the former would mirror the latter.
To the contrary, Bonica and Grumbach’s own theory implies something different. According to their account, moderating did offer noteworthy benefits in House races in the past when “all politics was local” — which is to say, when voters paid close attention to local politics (and therefore, House candidates’ placement).
This suggests that the benefits of moderation may grow in line with attention: The more prominent a candidate’s unorthodox positioning is to voters, the more probable it is that they will reward her for it. If so, then we should anticipate presidential moderation to have far greater consequences than moderation lower on the ballot. After all, we exist in a world in which voters pay more consideration to the parties’ nationwide images than to the placement of their House candidates.
Bonica’s past research offers some support for this line of reasoning. In a working paper from earlier in the year, he discovered that centrists held a greater edge over progressives in presidential races than in House races.
Therefore, even assuming that Grumbach and Bonica are correct, and there is no longer any advantage to down-ballot moderation, this would not necessarily invalidate the case for ideological restraint. Quite the opposite, if it’s true that Democratic contenders in red and purple regions are no longer capable of projecting unique ideological identities, then it may be even more critical — not less — for the party to moderate its national positions.
Related
- Does moderation actually work against Democratic candidates?
Adopting moderate positions on some issues could be helpful in elections, even if being more moderate is not
There’s one other reason why Grumbach and Bonica’s conclusions don’t settle the debate over moderation’s usefulness: They are evaluating the advantages of being more “moderate” in every way, and not those of shifting to the center on particular matters.
Even so, when Democrats are arguing about whether their party ought to become more moderate, they are usually fighting about the latter. Numerous progressives resist Democrats leaning to the right in any realm of policy. Simultaneously, center-left commentators insist that the party would be better off by adopting more conservative attitudes on precise matters, where Democrats currently find themselves to the left of what voters want.
It is not possible to disprove the latter view by way of Bonica and Grumbach’s methods. Seeking to do so is the same as confusing two separate topics:
- Do parties gain from taking on more favorable policies on prominent matters, even when doing so upsets a few of their coalition’s interest groups?
- Do candidates whose positions are collectively more moderate perform better than those whose attitudes are collectively more progressive?
These queries could yield distinct results. Regarding specific subjects, the progressive position is more widely accepted than the moderate one (for example, voters overwhelmingly back Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recommendation to put a ceiling on credit card interest rates). Hypothetically, moderate House contenders could stand to gain from their more conservative views on subjects like immigration and crime, while forfeiting votes for being overly centrist on economic concerns. In that scenario, it could be simultaneously factual that moderate Democrats don’t beat progressive ones — and that the Democratic Party would gain votes by shifting to the right regarding policing and immigration enforcement.
For the record, I’m not asserting that any of that is necessarily true, only that it is logically plausible. In theory, embracing well-liked positions (be they progressive or centrist) could be politically advantageous, even if maintaining more-moderate-on-average views is not.
And there is proof that aligning your policies with voters’ inclinations is still politically beneficial, even within today’s information atmosphere. In one recent study, voters became 14 percentage points more likely to back a congressional contender after being informed that they agreed with them on a given topic.
This is not a good time for careless reasoning about political give-and-take
I believe that it’s possible to line up the alarm regarding Trump’s authoritarianism with resisting Democratic moderation. For example, one might conclude that the president is actively disrupting the economy, and that a major recession will thrust Democrats back into positions of power, no matter what stances they hold. In that situation, a maximally progressive Democratic Party may be preferable to one that is maximally favored by the public: The vital thing is building Senate and House majorities made up of unwavering supporters, who will agree to put into effect the bold reforms that America needs (and which may, in theory, lessen the appeal of Trumpian illiberalism over the long haul).
In any case, within this precarious moment, it’s essential for Democrats not to underestimate the risks of ideological rigidity. Perhaps, the hazards of foregoing any and all moderation are negligible, as Grumbach and Bonica imply. Even so, their findings don’t truly prove that. And Democrats shouldn’t function based on the assumption that it does.
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Source: vox.com
