Pundit Brain Continues to Afflict Nation

People who know a lot and care a lot about politics want to believe that the average voter does too. But it isn't true.

When I was a young man, I went on lots of job interviews, and usually didn’t perform very well. The artificiality of the exercise always made me profoundly uncomfortable; one interviewer even said to me, “You hate this, don’t you?” Every once in a while, though, I’d say something clever enough to make an impact.

Which is what happened when, at the age of 24 and with a couple of jobs as a campaign grunt under my belt, I was interviewing at a political consulting firm when I mentioned that one of the conclusions I had come to after way too much phone banking and door knocking was that those of us in the politics business have a real problem when it comes to voters: We know way more than voters do, and that makes it hard for us to understand them.

We think about politics all the time, we understand the basics of how voting works, we know how a bill becomes a law, and we may even have a grasp of some policy issues. But as you learn when you spend time talking to them, most voters understand little if anything about these things. That means that the political professionals have a very hard time getting inside their heads and seeing things from their perspective, which is essential to crafting strategies that will persuade them.

My interviewer seemed impressed, as though this was an insight he hadn’t thought of before, and I got the job. Later I wound up in grad school and learned that political scientists had spent decades investigating the sources, details, and implications of widespread voter ignorance.

“Ignorance” isn’t a very nice word, and the charitable way this is often described is that while some people find politics interesting and pay a lot of attention to it, most people don’t. They’re worried about their jobs, their kids, and whatever else is going on in their lives, so most of them don’t come home after a long day and turn on cable news to find out what happened in today’s House Rules Committee meeting. They learn about what’s happening in drips and drabs, but most of it is at a very superficial level, and that’s fine with them. It isn’t a matter of being dumb; the same person who doesn’t know who the Speaker of the House is might be able to tell you what’s going on with their favorite football team at an extraordinary level of detail and subtlety, because that happens to be something they care about.

This is something every political scientist knows. Yet somehow, lots of important people who work in politics and write about politics for a living continue to believe that voters see the political world in the same way they do. In particular, they think that like them, voters have rationally organized views about policy that assemble into coherent ideological systems, and therefore parties and candidates can improve their performance by moving toward or away from the “center,” tweaking their positions and the emphasis of their communication to maximize their performance with the elusive “median voter.”

It has always been thus

For all the years I’ve been around politics, people have been debating whether Democrats should move to the center or go left to mobilize their base. We’re still having that debate today. The underlying premise is that voters themselves have a discernible ideology and will respond if candidates position themselves closer to that position. Yet since at least the 1960s, political scientists have been wrestling with the lack of ideology among the electorate. The most influential early work in this area was an article by Philip Converse called “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” which argued that only a sliver of voters had coherent ideological beliefs. He classified only 3% of voters as “Ideologues,” while another 12% were “Near-Ideologues”; the rest arrived at their positions on issues through group affiliation, a response to whatever was happening at the time, or completely randomly. Here’s his key table:

In the ensuing decades, other scholars built a mountain of research on the implications of Converse’s study. A lot of it could be understood as apologetics, endeavoring to explain that even though voters might not know very much, they can still make reasonable decisions either individually or collectively. Many books have been written making this argument (see here or here or here).

The fact that most people don’t know very much about policy or politics doesn’t necessarily mean that adjusting your ideology will never work; voters still have feelings about issues, and all else being equal, a candidate would seem to be in the best position if they align with the feelings of the maximum number of voters. But all else is never equal, and the pursuit of the median voter may never have been more fruitless than it is today.

That brings me to some excellent recent work showing how important it is to keep in mind that voters are nothing like pundits and political professionals. First, Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach took on the central claim of many a centrist pundit and moderate Democratic advocacy group, that there is clear evidence that moderate candidates perform better than those whose issue positions are farther from the center. Sure, your AOC types might succeed in places where the electorate is overwhelmingly left-leaning, but overall it’s better to tack to the center. Bonica and Grumbach find that it just isn’t true:

The small to nonexistent effects of moderation in the modern era shouldn’t be surprising. Decades ago when “all politics was local,” a candidate’s moderation likely carried significant benefits. In the Trump era, by contrast, elections are driven by national tides, candidate charisma, and anti-establishment credibility—qualities that neither political consultants nor academics know how to manufacture.

This point is central to this story: All politics is now national. This has been evident for a few years now; I wrote back in 2019 about research by Emory’s Alan Abramowitz showing that the benefits of both moderation and incumbency in House elections were disappearing. Voters are essentially deciding which party they’re mad at or which party they think should be in charge in Washington and voting accordingly, regardless of what the specific candidates in their district are saying.

Which is perfectly rational! It makes much more of a difference who controls the House than whether my member of Congress is a little more to the right or the left, so it would be logical to ignore their particular positions and just choose by party. When you layer on the fact that few voters are even thinking ideologically, you get the kind of ever-shifting electoral results we’ve been seeing.

That brings us to this piece by G. Elliott Morris, in which he uses survey data to show that “Most Americans tell us they want a party that improves their general standard of living, and don’t use ideological language at all when describing what their ideal political party would stand for.” Here’s one of his charts:

That “moderate” group looks pretty small. In any case, there are a couple of important things to understand about the “affordability” that’s on everyone’s mind. The first is that it is the top concern right now, and it will certainly be a concern for a while. But not forever; if at some future date the economy is doing great and we’ve also had first contact with an alien species, the top issue on voters’ minds will probably be “What to do about the aliens.”

The second is that affordability as an issue is neither liberal nor conservative. It’s good for Democrats now because Republicans are in charge, and people blame whoever’s in charge for whatever they don’t like. It was bad for Democrats a year ago because the president was a Democrat. If Democrats win in 2026 and 2028 and people still feel economically precarious, it’ll be bad for Democrats again. I may think Democrats’ ideas about making life more affordable are better than Republicans’ ideas, but voters without firm party commitments will mostly vote against the party in charge if they’re unhappy, whichever party that is.

The lack of ideological thinking among the electorate presents a kind of emotional problem for Democrats, precisely because they care about policy. It’s what they want to talk about, and they think it matters. Which it does — when it comes time to govern. And sometimes, talking about policy during a campaign can convince people that you have ideas to address their main concerns, but most of the time it doesn’t much matter what the precise content of those ideas is.

And after all, if voters had clear and coherent ideological beliefs, we wouldn’t need to have campaigns at all; candidates could just put out a set of policy papers, and the wise and informed voters would choose whichever platform they prefer. The very fact that we spend so much time arguing about ridiculous fake issues and micro-controversies while being inundated with inane campaign ads shows that the voters aren’t particularly rational. It’s not an ideal world, but it’s the one we live in.

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