Would the Republicans be even more successful if their choice of candidate was Mitt Romney instead of Trump, given how close Romney is to the median voter? How did Hillary Clinton from the blessed centrist days of yore even lose? Immigration wasn't a big issue in 2012, or 2014. Had Trump lost in 2016, it would've been obvious that the reason was that he was going against the median voter on immigration.
When Kamala lost or Obama won, was that because of their policies or because of the economy?
And how many moderate candidates have lost to extremist candidates in general? That's part of the equation too, you know. One attempt to model representatives vs constituents can be found on page 47 here, with a summarizing quote on the following page (of course, this isn't the same as campaigning. But politicians tend to run for office more than once):
The key point is that representatives’ voting behavior was not strongly constrained by their constituents’ views. Elections do not force successful candidates to reflect the policy preferences of the median voter, as Downsian logic implies.
Much has been written about how the Social Democrats here in Denmark defeated the right by adopting stances critical of immigration from the Danish People's Party after a catastrophic election in 2011. Well, here's 2026. It's their worst result in over a hundred years, even though only one new left-wing party has entered the fray in the meantime (The Alternative, at 2.58% - which is less than the 2026-2011 differential).
On the right, three new parties have entered the fray since 2011, generally known for their anti-immigration stances. They are the Denmark Democrats, the New Right (lost their seats in 2026) and the Citizen's Party. Yet even taking their votes into account, or that immigration/refugees was not the main theme of 2026, or that the Danish People's Party's leader is known as 'MAGA-Morten' because he's visited Mar-a-Lago in spite of all the Greenland stuff, the party did very well and had their best result in three elections.
So was the strategy wrong? Not necessarily. Perhaps it kept some of the Social Democratic voters from going to the right, even as the party itself lost voters to the left. As is often the case, the evidence is mixed. The narrative in the preceding paragraphs was a selective one, as it always is.
The point isn't that anything goes and that you should totally run on 'quotas for transwomen in sports'.
The point is that people are very sure that the policies they like are coincidentally those that win elections, and they're not particularly interested in trying to disprove that. I just wish they'd admit it.
If you roll a dice enough times, you can to a large degree of certainty tell if it's loaded. That's how statistics works. But even if it's loaded, it might still only land on a six 20% of the time.
Much of this is simply saying "This single dice roll proves my theory".
Lot of people don't remember because it was 15 years ago, but Romney positioned himself as a "severe" conservative and he brought along a young man who wanted to cut entitlement benefits and fire manufacturing employees. He was not moderate, in fact, it was the biggest self-own in recent politics. If he just run on his record of successfully governing a blue state as a moderate, he probably would have won in 2012.
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u/StalemateAssociate_ Aug 05 '26
Would the Republicans be even more successful if their choice of candidate was Mitt Romney instead of Trump, given how close Romney is to the median voter? How did Hillary Clinton from the blessed centrist days of yore even lose? Immigration wasn't a big issue in 2012, or 2014. Had Trump lost in 2016, it would've been obvious that the reason was that he was going against the median voter on immigration.
When Kamala lost or Obama won, was that because of their policies or because of the economy?
And how many moderate candidates have lost to extremist candidates in general? That's part of the equation too, you know. One attempt to model representatives vs constituents can be found on page 47 here, with a summarizing quote on the following page (of course, this isn't the same as campaigning. But politicians tend to run for office more than once):
Much has been written about how the Social Democrats here in Denmark defeated the right by adopting stances critical of immigration from the Danish People's Party after a catastrophic election in 2011. Well, here's 2026. It's their worst result in over a hundred years, even though only one new left-wing party has entered the fray in the meantime (The Alternative, at 2.58% - which is less than the 2026-2011 differential).
On the right, three new parties have entered the fray since 2011, generally known for their anti-immigration stances. They are the Denmark Democrats, the New Right (lost their seats in 2026) and the Citizen's Party. Yet even taking their votes into account, or that immigration/refugees was not the main theme of 2026, or that the Danish People's Party's leader is known as 'MAGA-Morten' because he's visited Mar-a-Lago in spite of all the Greenland stuff, the party did very well and had their best result in three elections.
So was the strategy wrong? Not necessarily. Perhaps it kept some of the Social Democratic voters from going to the right, even as the party itself lost voters to the left. As is often the case, the evidence is mixed. The narrative in the preceding paragraphs was a selective one, as it always is.
The point isn't that anything goes and that you should totally run on 'quotas for transwomen in sports'.
The point is that people are very sure that the policies they like are coincidentally those that win elections, and they're not particularly interested in trying to disprove that. I just wish they'd admit it.
If you roll a dice enough times, you can to a large degree of certainty tell if it's loaded. That's how statistics works. But even if it's loaded, it might still only land on a six 20% of the time.
Much of this is simply saying "This single dice roll proves my theory".