The day after any election, the same argument begins. If the Democrat lost, someone says the nominee was too far left. If the Republican lost, someone says the nominee was too far right. The cure, the argument goes, is to move toward the middle. But what political science says about how voters decide suggests this framing is often backwards, and that the real story is more complicated than the simple moderates versus progressives divide.
Start with a basic fact about the electorate. The idea that voters hold a coherent ideology—a consistent set of policy positions that they match to a candidate like an entree off a menu—is rare. The political scientist Philip Converse found decades ago that only about one voter in nine reasons ideologically. Later work by Kinder and Kalmoe found that share has barely moved. More recently, G. Elliott Morris put the number at 10 to 15 percent. That is a small slice of the public. Most people do not think in left and right at all. They have feelings about parties, groups, and leaders, plus a few strong opinions on specific issues, but not a unified worldview that tells them which candidate to support.
If voters do not think in left and right, then the claim that a candidate was too far left or too far right needs a different explanation. One common story is that candidates persuade swing voters with their positions. But the evidence for campaign persuasion is thin. Across 49 field experiments, Kalla and Broockman’s best estimate of campaign persuasion in a general election is zero. That does not mean ads and speeches do nothing. It means they rarely change someone’s mind about whom to vote for. What they do is mobilize people who already lean a certain way, or remind them why they like their party’s nominee.
So if persuasion is weak, what drives elections? Two things dominate: party loyalty and the fundamentals. Party loyalty is the strongest predictor of the vote. Most people vote for the party they identify with, regardless of the candidate’s ideology. The fundamentals are the state of the economy, incumbency, and other structural conditions. Morris’s two-input fundamentals model—based on those conditions—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 a razor-thin margin, not a mandate for any ideological direction.
This is where the Strategist’s Fallacy comes in. Morris named it in October 2025: the belief that voters hold positions after and match them to candidates like an entree off a menu. The fallacy is comforting because it makes elections controllable. If you lose, you just adjust the menu. But the research says voters are not doing that. They are mostly voting for their party, and their choice is heavily shaped by conditions they do not control.
Now consider the moderation debate. Some strategists argue that the way to win is to move to the center, especially to win over persuadable voters. The problem is that persuadable voters are not necessarily moderates. They are often low-information voters who pay little attention and are not ideologically consistent. They may swing based on the economy, a scandal, or a feeling of change, not based on a candidate’s position on a 1-to-10 scale. Meanwhile, Broockman and Skovron found that legislators in both parties overestimate how conservative their constituents are. That means many politicians already think the public is further right than it is, which can push them away from policies that might actually be popular.
The moderates versus progressives debate inside the Democratic Party is a good example. WelcomePAC’s report Deciding to Win recommends a 2028 Democratic nominee willing to break with progressive advocacy groups. That is a strategic argument, not a finding about voters. It assumes that breaking with progressives will help with swing voters. But the evidence does not clearly support that. If voters are not ideological, then a candidate’s position on a progressive–moderate spectrum may matter less than whether they seem competent, likeable, and connected to the party base.
So how should you read claims that a candidate was too far left or too far right? Treat them as guesses about strategy, not as descriptions of what voters actually did. The claim may be true in a specific district or a specific year, but it is not a law of politics. The fundamentals and party loyalty were probably more important. When someone says a candidate lost because of ideology, ask what the economy looked like, how the incumbent was rated, and whether the other party’s base turned out. The answer will usually be more about those factors than about the candidate’s place on a spectrum. Voters do not think in left and right, so the cure for a loss is rarely a shift in ideology. It is usually time, conditions, and a bit of luck.