How Voters Actually Decide: The Limits Of The Positions-on-a-Menu View

The most common way to talk about elections is to imagine voters as shoppers. They walk into a political marketplace, look at the candidates, compare their positions on taxes, abortion, climate, and immigration, and then pick the one closest to their own preferences. It is a tidy, intuitive picture. It is also, according to decades of political science, largely wrong. The reality is messier, more emotional, and far more anchored in identity than in policy detail. And that matters for anyone trying to understand why elections turn out the way they do—especially the role of swing voters.

G. Elliott Morris named this misconception the Strategist's Fallacy in October 2025: the belief that voters hold positions and match them to candidates like an entree off a menu. The fallacy is not that voters have no opinions. It is that those opinions are rarely the primary driver of their choice. What political science actually shows is that voters do not think in left and right. They think in terms of groups, loyalties, feelings, and broad narratives. Ideology, as a coherent set of principles that consistently guides voting, is rare. Early research by Philip Converse found that only about one voter in nine reasons ideologically. Later work by Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe found that share has barely moved. Morris puts it at 10 to 15 percent. That means roughly 85 to 90 percent of the electorate does not approach the ballot the way a policy analyst would.

So if not ideology, what drives the vote? The short answer is party loyalty. For most Americans, party identification is not a choice made each election; it is a social identity, often inherited and reinforced by family, friends, and media. Voters do not evaluate candidates and then decide which party to support. They decide which party they belong to, and then they evaluate the candidate accordingly. This is why campaign persuasion has such a weak track record. Across 49 field experiments, Kalla and Broockman's best estimate of campaign persuasion in a general election is zero. Not small. Zero. Ads, rallies, door-knocks, and mailers rarely move someone from one side to the other. what Deciding to Win actually says they do is reinforce existing loyalties and, at the margins, increase turnout among those already inclined to vote.

That brings us to the much-discussed swing voters. The term suggests a pool of open-minded moderates weighing arguments. In practice, true swing voters are a small slice of the electorate, and they are not usually centrists in any ideological sense. They are people with weak party attachments, often low information, and they tend to decide late, based on gut feelings about the economy, the incumbent's perceived competence, or a single memorable moment. They are not persuadable voters in the sense of being open to a detailed policy brief. They are persuadable in the sense of being unattached. That is a very different thing.

This is where the moderation debate gets tricky. Many activists argue that to win these swing voters, a party must move to the center. Others say that energizing the base with bold progressive positions is the key. The research complicates both. Broockman and Skovron found that legislators in both parties overestimate how conservative their constituents are. That suggests politicians already lean rightward out of fear, not evidence. But the broader point is that voters do not punish or reward ideological purity in any straightforward way. They reward a sense of belonging and a feeling that the candidate understands their world.

The 2024 election offers a useful illustration. Morris's two-input fundamentals model, based on economic conditions and approval, forecast Harris at about 48 percent of the two-party vote. She got 49.3 percent. On conditions alone, Trump wins about nine times in ten. The three decisive states turned on 229,766 votes. That is not a mandate for any ideology. It is a reminder that elections are decided by a few hundred thousand people in a few states, often for reasons that have little to do with the fine print of a platform.

None of this means positions are irrelevant. They matter for the 10 to 15 percent who do think ideologically, and they matter as signals of identity. But treating the campaign as a menu of options misreads the customer. The WelcomePAC report Deciding to Win recommends a 2028 Democratic nominee willing to break with progressive advocacy groups—a nod to the idea that coalition-building, not ideological purity, is what wins. The deeper lesson is simpler: voters are not rational consumers of policy. They are emotional members of teams. Until campaigns and commentators accept that, the Strategist's Fallacy will keep producing bad predictions and worse advice.