This wreaks of the centrism “common sense” that keeps losing us elections. It’s built on the assumption that moderates are innately more electable, while history has shown this is anything but the case. It’s a kind of magical thinking completely divorced from reality.
The flaw in this thinking is that it assumes that there is a large population of political moderates waiting to be appealed to. This is what’s cost Democrats the working class - abandoning workers rights and benefits in the hope of wooing suburban conservatives. And it’s failed election after election.
It fails because there aren’t actually very many true moderates. If you poll people who are politically unaligned, it’s not that they’re unaligned because they lie right between the parties. They’re unaligned because their politics simply don’t match to the existing partisan alignment. Think someone that is pro-gun rights but also supports Medicare for All.
Running performative centrists doesn’t do anything to appeal to these voters, it just makes your candidate come off as inauthentic. Some issues just don’t have reasonable compromises on them. If one party wants to greatly restrict the civil rights of some minority group, taking the centrist position of only restricting their rights a little bit still makes you look like a monster to anyone with a conscience.
This is why centrists fail. Almost no one actually had beliefs that are in the dead middle of the political spectrum. Appealing to these mythical voters is a strategy that fails again and again.
This wreaks of the centrism “common sense” that keeps losing us elections. It’s built on the assumption that moderates are innately more electable, while history has shown this is anything but the case. It’s a kind of magical thinking completely divorced from reality.
The flaw in this thinking is that it assumes that there is a large population of political moderates waiting to be appealed to. This is what’s cost Democrats the working class - abandoning workers rights and benefits in the hope of wooing suburban conservatives. And it’s failed election after election.
It fails because there aren’t actually very many true moderates. If you poll people who are politically unaligned, it’s not that they’re unaligned because they lie right between the parties. They’re unaligned because their politics simply don’t match to the existing partisan alignment. Think someone that is pro-gun rights but also supports Medicare for All.
Running performative centrists doesn’t do anything to appeal to these voters, it just makes your candidate come off as inauthentic. Some issues just don’t have reasonable compromises on them. If one party wants to greatly restrict the civil rights of some minority group, taking the centrist position of only restricting their rights a little bit still makes you look like a monster to anyone with a conscience.
This is why centrists fail. Almost no one actually had beliefs that are in the dead middle of the political spectrum. Appealing to these mythical voters is a strategy that fails again and again.