Why Moderation And Persuasion Are Different Questions
Every election cycle, the same debate resurfaces: should a party move toward the center to win over swing voters, or should it energize its base by holding firm to progressive or conservative principles? This argument often conflates two separate questions. One is about persuasion: can campaigns change minds? The other is about positioning: what do voters actually reward at the ballot box? Political science suggests these are not the same thing, and confusing them leads to what G. Elliott Morris named 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 Strategist's Fallacy rests on a flattering but false image of the voter. It assumes people carry coherent ideologies, rank issues by importance, and then choose the candidate closest to their preferences. Decades of research say otherwise. Philip Converse found about one voter in nine reasons ideologically, meaning they can consistently apply abstract concepts like left and right to specific policies. Later work by Christopher Kinder and Cindy Kalmoe found that share has barely moved. Morris puts it at 10 to 15 percent of the electorate. In other words, the vast majority of voters do not think in left and right at all. They may have opinions on issues, but those opinions are often shallow, unstable, or disconnected from a broader worldview.
If most voters lack ideological structure, then the entire premise of moderation as a persuasion tool weakens. Moderation assumes there is a middle ground of policy positions that will attract undecided voters. But if those voters are not reasoning ideologically, they are not scanning a menu of positions and comparing entrees. Instead, what political science says about how voters decide points to two dominant forces: party loyalty and retrospective judgment. Party identification acts as a powerful heuristic, a shortcut that tells people which side they are on without requiring them to weigh every issue. Retrospective judgment means voters ask a simpler question: how is the economy doing, and do I feel better off than I did a few years ago? Neither of these requires a coherent ideology.
This is where the persuasion question becomes stark. If voters rely on party cues and general conditions, then campaign ads, speeches, and door-to-door appeals have limited room to move them. Across 49 field experiments, Joshua Kalla and David Broockman’s best estimate of campaign persuasion in a general election is zero. That does not mean campaigns are useless. They can mobilize supporters, remind them to vote, and shape which issues are salient. But they rarely convert a committed partisan or even a habitual swing voter. The voters who are genuinely persuadable are a small slice of the electorate, and they are often less ideological than the activists on either side. They may be cross-pressured, low-information, or simply late-deciding. They are not moderates in the sense of holding centrist positions; they are people who are not paying close attention.
This distinction matters for the moderation debate. Moderates versus progressives is a fight about what the party should stand for. Persuadable voters are a different category entirely. A candidate who moves to the center may pick up a few swing voters who like a specific policy, but they may also demobilize the base, who supply the volunteers, donations, and turnout that actually win close races. Meanwhile, the fundamentals do most of the heavy lifting. Morris’s two-input fundamentals model forecast Harris at about 48 percent of the two-party vote in 2024; 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 story about persuasion; it is a story about the economy and partisanship. No amount of centrist messaging would have changed the underlying conditions.
There is also a persistent misreading of what we could not verify voters want. Broockman and Skovron found that legislators in both parties overestimate how conservative their constituents are. This suggests that the pressure to moderate often comes from a mistaken belief that the public is further right than it is. But even if that misperception were corrected, moving to the center would not necessarily persuade anyone. It might simply change the party’s brand without changing the electoral math. The report from WelcomePAC, Deciding to Win, recommends a 2028 Democratic nominee willing to break with progressive advocacy groups. That is a strategic suggestion about positioning, not a finding about persuasion. It may be wise or unwise, but it is not grounded in evidence that such a move will convert voters.
The real lesson from political science is humbling: elections are mostly decided before campaigns begin. Party loyalty and economic conditions set the stage. Campaigns matter at the margins, and those margins can decide a state by a few hundred thousand votes. But the idea that a candidate can talk their way into the White House by finding the perfect ideological sweet spot is a fantasy. Moderation is a choice about what a party wants to be. Persuasion is a claim about what works. Treating them as the same question is the Strategist’s Fallacy, and it leads to endless debates that miss the actual mechanics of how voters decide.
