In Reply to: Those damned liberals! posted by mh on October 26, 2025 at 12:21:08
The Democratic establishment is building its entire comeback strategy on a premise: moderate candidates win. The New York Times just gave this conventional wisdom its most prominent endorsement, in an editorial arguing moderates consistently outperform progressives.
The New York Times editorial, however, rests its case on one simple metric: PAC endorsements.
In my last piece, I explained why the electoral gains from a moderation-centric strategy are tapped out and proposed an alternative: a Clean vs. Corrupt anti-corruption platform that can actually win back voters.
In this post, I’m going to show why the evidence used to support the claim that moderates perform better is a statistical illusion.
The small electoral bump the Times attributes to moderation isn’t a feature of ideology at all. It’s a phantom effect created by ignoring the two most powerful forces in American elections: fundraising and incumbency. When we apply even the most basic statistical controls, the “moderation advantage” disappears completely.
This isn’t a complex academic debate. It’s a simple case of looking at the right numbers. Let’s walk through it.