You’re likely familiar with the debate about the electoral benefits of ‘moderation.’ One side argues that moving to the center will appeal to more voters, and the other is in vehement opposition, preferring the agenda established by the most left-wing interest groups.
I’ve always found the debate to be overly simple and frankly tedious. That’s because labels like ‘moderate’ or ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ do not define the vast majority of the American electorate. In an era that offers the potential for political realignment, parties looking to build durable power will need to appeal to the incredibly diverse and often vexingly inconsistent viewpoints of the public.
Last week, in an exclusive collaboration with the New York Times, we released findings from a sprawling research project that demonstrate this concept in hard data. Across four qualitative and quantitative surveys and 9,000 voter contacts, we found that nearly three-quarters of the American electorate can be classified as heterodox: their worldviews are composed by taking a little from column A and a little from column B, and do not map neatly onto liberal or conservative templates.
Some of them want the government to provide universal healthcare, but also believe in traditional gender roles. Others want the border secured, and for the government to tax the hell out of rich people. But in their refusal to be pigeonholed, this supermajority of voters reflects the dynamism and originality of the American people.
You can read the full spread of voter groups and the ideological findings here. But for the purposes of this piece, I want to explain what I think this means for the future of Democratic politics.
As I explain in my recently released book, Supermajority, Democrats are aiming too low if they set their goal at winning narrow congressional majorities. To pass the ambitious policy agenda and structural reforms we will need to defeat the fascist threat, they don’t just need to win; they need to win big, which requires competing in swaths of the country where the Democratic brand is currently toxic. That doesn’t mean moving to the center or to the left. It means embracing the ideological diversity—the heterodoxy—that defines the American electorate.
A clear-eyed view of the American electorate
While the electorate is ideologically inconsistent, we were able to segment voters into nine groups with distinct clusters of beliefs. For example, the Neighborhood Watch category describes an older, racially diverse group of voters who support a strong welfare state, increased government regulation, and a more orderly society, whereas folks who fall into the Stars, Stripes, and Steeple category likely share the concern about order but are more supportive of international humanitarian aid. They’re also more likely to be white and favor more conservative domestic economic policies.
Looking at these nine voter segments, I was struck by the fact that only one of the groups reliably supported the policies that defined the left during what we’ve all come to call ‘Woke 1’—and contributed mightily to defining the Democratic Party brand.
We call this the Liberal Arts Left; they’re the most likely to favor policies like border decriminalization, student loan forgiveness, or aggressive climate policy. They also have a high tolerance for social disorder and are by far the most dogmatically socially liberal.
During the last competitive Democratic presidential primary, virtually every candidate was tripping over themselves to appeal to this group. It’s no wonder the Democratic brand began to sour in states like Ohio or Iowa, where Liberal Arts Left voters are far outnumbered, despite the fact that both used to reliably elect Democrats just a few election cycles ago.
At the same time, only one voter group, the Cul-de-Sac Conservatives, supported the sort of small-government economic policy that is most associated with traditional Republicans like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. That explains why Trump was able to expand the party’s tent in 2016, when he performed his own version of heterodoxy by embracing liberal ideas such as universal healthcare and opposition to the Iraq War, while promising to protect Medicare and Social Security. This enabled him to draw from a larger pool of voters, many of them working-class.
Of course, Trump hasn’t built a supermajority coalition for the same reason that Democrats haven’t been able to defeat his MAGA movement. Both parties have overwhelmingly prioritized ideological purity over heterodoxy, failing to build a big tent capable of housing the three-quarters of the electorate who hold a heterodox mix of views.
The path to a supermajority runs through those voters.
The secret third thing
Some party strategists agree with our diagnosis that the party has become too influenced by left-wing interest groups, but then default to the idea that the Democratic Party must moderate across all issues and all races.
And I think that’s wrongheaded too. First, our survey data shows that the Beltway definition of ‘moderation’ isn’t what people are looking for—for example, most voters actually want more government intervention in the economy.
The second problem is that it treats the American electorate like a monolith. Heterodoxy doesn’t imply a blanket ideology for everyone in the country; it understands that a voter in the suburbs of Michigan is going to want something different than a voter in northern Alaska.
In practice, this could mean embracing fossil fuel production in a state like Texas where the industry supports hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs, while also supporting economic populism. Even within economic policy, there’s room for maneuver; a politician like Chris Deluzio can favor more protectionism because his western Pennsylvania district faced deindustrialization, whereas Gabe Vasquez can more vehemently support free trade in his southern New Mexico district because his voters rely on cross-border trade. Both approaches are well-suited to winning swing voters in the areas they represent.
The Democratic Party is at its best when it tolerates this kind of ideological diversity and disavows litmus tests, even when it comes to our most sensitive topics.
As a reflection of how heterodoxy matters on trans issues, our polling shows two important things: First, there is broad support among the public for virtually every category of civil rights protections for trans adults. Second, breaking with the maximalist, left-wing positions on children and sports yielded an increase in candidate support of 10.9 points—one of the biggest boosts out of any issue we polled.
Democrats have become more heterodox, but can be better
The good news is that Democrats today have a much better shot at building a supermajority than Republicans.
That’s because they’ve become more heterodox, while Republicans have become less so.
Republicans such as Susan Collins in Maine, Mike Lawler in New York, and Mike Rogers in Michigan built images for themselves as independent-minded, heterodox candidates by occasionally breaking with their party, but that’s over. Today, they have been cowed into becoming rubber stamps for Trump, supporting his price-raising tariffs and reckless war in Iran.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, we are seeing the opposite trend: ideological diversity is breaking through.
In Alaska, Mary Peltola is embracing fossil fuel production and oil refining, all as part of her pledge to reduce energy costs for residents as quickly as possible. This has meant criticizing her party and the Biden administration in their approach to energy policy and calling out the green groups that protest expanded Alaska oil projects. In a recent radio interview, she said: “I don’t feel like they—many of the people in that movement—are willing to curtail any of their energy uses, whether it’s on their computer or in their car or plane trips, but they expect us to stop producing.” She’s leading her Senate opponent in the polls, despite the fact that Trump won the state by nearly thirteen points.
In Iowa, Rob Sand is running a tight gubernatorial race with an agenda that was described in The Atlantic as not being “progressive or moderate.” It’s that secret third thing, heterodoxy. He’s talking about holding big corporations and data centers accountable while breaking with the left on trans participation in sports. And it’s making his Republican opponent, Zach Lahn, furious. In a recent video, he complained, “It’s like The Truman Show. He’s not a moderate.”
Whether it’s James Talarico touring Texas border counties and getting his immigration plan endorsed by a conservative sheriff or Roy Cooper running tough-on-crime ads in North Carolina, the top-performing Senate candidates are the ones who are embracing heterodoxy and defying ideological labels. In doing so, they’re connecting with the broad swath of the electorate that does not identify as singularly liberal or conservative.
Democrats have a unique and very real opportunity here. Republicans are not attempting to win over the supermajority of ideologically inconsistent voters we identified in our polling project. They are deep in the throes of MAGA, putting them squarely in what I like to call the “pain cave,” forced to loyally back a profoundly unpopular president and his failed policies.
Winning a supermajority is possible. But it will mean continuing to embrace the ideological diversity that defines the American electorate—that secret third thing.
While in practice I think the distributions involved in heterodoxy trend towards moderation in aggregate, I think your frame is both more electorally resonant and more strictly accurate, especially as a function of regional variation for reasons you mention.
When the hell did puberty blockers for children and biological men in women’s sports become a ‘left wing’ issue? I can’t imagine FDR letting that be the thing that defined the New Deal
I do have a good answer for Democrats who are hit with the ‘what is a woman’ gotcha question
Just reply “if you’re being paid 87 cents to do a job a man is paid a dollar to do then you’re probably a woman”