Two new studies reveal very few voters want a genuinely centrist political party — and moderation's electoral payoff is smaller, riskier, and less reliable than its advocates suggest
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS
When you ask voters to describe what kind of political party they want, in their own words, only 8% of self-identified “moderates” actually call for an ideologically moderate political party. Most instead want a party focused on affordability, political reform, or general left-leaning priorities — particularly economic ones.
This number comes from Blue Rose Research, which recently replicated my earlier LLM voter segmentation work at larger scale. Blue Rose asked thousands of Americans to describe their ideal political party, then used a large language model to cluster the responses. Most self-described moderates landed in left, right, affordability-focused, or anti-system camps — not centrist ones. Compared to my work, Blue Rose finds comparatively more Americans in the left-leaning and anti-system buckets.
That finding arrived almost simultaneously with a second, complementary piece of evidence: a major new paper by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla showing that candidates who move to the “elite middle” on issue positions gain, on average, just one to two percentage points of vote margin — in a maximally favorable experimental design where every voter has complete information (in a real campaign, the effect is probably half that or smaller).
These two new research findings suggest a more nuanced view of political ideology in America is more helpful than one that reduces politics to one axis and focuses exclusively on the (minimal) role policy preferences play in driving voter behavior.
Today’s Deep Dive covers new data showing voters in “the middle” are not asking for ideological centrism, despite what centrist analysts have written. And trying to win swing voters through generic moderation produces effects so small and inconsistent that the advice is practically useless.