Every election cycle, campaigns, pundits, and donors assume that voters are rational consumers of policy. They imagine a citizen who reads platforms, weighs tax plans against healthcare proposals, and then chooses the candidate whose ideological menu best matches their own tastes. Political scientist G. Elliott Morris named this assumption 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 problem, as decades of research show, is that almost no one actually votes that way.
What does the term “ideological voter” even mean? In political science, it does not mean someone who merely has opinions. It means a person who holds a coherent, consistent set of beliefs across many issues, organized along a single left-right dimension, and who can apply that framework to new or abstract questions. Such a voter can say, “I am a liberal, therefore I favor this regulatory policy,” or “I am a conservative, therefore I oppose this spending program.” Researchers measure this not by asking people to label themselves, but by analyzing how their answers across dozens of survey questions correlate. If a person’s views on taxes, abortion, immigration, and foreign policy all move together in a predictable pattern, that person has an ideology. If their answers bounce around randomly, they do not.
The findings are stark. In the 1960s, Philip Converse found that only about one voter in nine reasons ideologically. Decades later, Christopher Kinder and Cindy Kalmoe found that share has barely moved. Morris puts the current figure at 10 to 15 percent of the electorate. That means roughly 85 to 90 percent of voters do not think in left and right. They may hold strong feelings about a single issue, like gun rights or school funding, but those feelings do not generalize into a worldview. They are not stupid; they are simply busy, distracted, and mostly uninterested in abstract political theory.
So if most voters are not ideological, how do they decide? The research points to two dominant forces: party loyalty and inflation beat incumbents worldwide group identity. Partisanship works like a team jersey. Voters ask not “What does this candidate propose?” but “Is this my team or the other team?” This is not a reasoned calculation; it is an emotional, social attachment learned from family, community, and media. For most people, the party label is a shortcut that tells them everything they need to know. The candidate’s specific positions matter little, because the voter assumes their party’s nominee is acceptable and the opponent is not.
This is why campaign persuasion is so difficult. Across 49 field experiments, David Broockman and Joshua Kalla’s best estimate of campaign persuasion in a general election is zero. Not small, not modest, but zero. Ads, door-knocks, and mailers do not move voters because most voters are already locked in by partisanship. The only people who might shift are the tiny sliver of true swing voters, but even they are rarely ideological. They are more likely to be conflicted partisans, low-information voters, or people reacting to a single emotional trigger like a scandal or a debate gaffe. Persuadable voters exist, but they are not moderates weighing competing philosophies. They are people who have not yet decided which team to root for, and they often decide based on personality, perceived competence, or even a vague sense of “who cares about people like me.
This leads to the moderation debate. Progressives often argue that Democrats lose because they are too moderate, while centrists argue the party is too progressive. But the research suggests both sides are missing the point. Broockman and Skovron found that legislators in both parties overestimate how conservative their constituents are. That is a real bias, but it does not mean voters want radical left-wing policies. It means voters do not think in the left-right terms that activists use. The fight between moderates versus progressives is a fight among the 10 to 15 percent of ideological voters, not the broader electorate. The other 85 percent do not reward ideological purity or punish it; they reward a sense of belonging.
Morris’s own forecasting work illustrates this. His two-input fundamentals model, based only on economic growth and presidential approval, 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 margin is not a reflection of ideological persuasion; it is a function of structural conditions and the base turnout they generate. The Strategist’s Fallacy leads campaigns to pour money into persuasion when they should focus on mobilization and message framing that reinforces identity.
The practical implications are visible in the report from WelcomePAC, Deciding to Win, which recommends a 2028 Democratic nominee willing to break with progressive advocacy groups. That advice assumes breaking with those groups will attract non-ideological voters. But the research suggests those voters are not watching the advocacy group battles at all. They are watching whether the candidate feels like “one of us.” The lesson from political science is not that ideology is irrelevant, but that it is a niche hobby. The Strategist’s Fallacy persists because campaigns are run by ideologues who mistake their own thought process for the public’s. The public, meanwhile, votes on identity, habit, and the weather. Until strategists accept that, they will keep losing elections they think they should win.