Decisions of parties to run moderate or extreme candidates

Palko points to this article by political journalist Jonathan Chait, “The Democrats Remembered How Politics Works Again: An end to a decade of magical thinking.” Chait points out that pundits and political professionals on the left, right, and center anticipated a Democratic wipeout in 2022, all for different reasons: The left thought the Democrats were insufficiently progressive and so would not be able to motivate their core voters; the right thought that Biden and the Democratic congress had alienated voters with their liberal policies; and everybody expected that historical patterns of midterm elections would result in big wins for the out-party. A few months before the election, Chris Wlezien and I argued that these expectations should change given the controversial decisions by the Republican-controlled Supreme Court during the months before the election.

Chait puts it well:

And indeed, the election results, both in the aggregate and in many of the particulars, vindicate the belief that voters tend to punish rather than reward parties and candidates they associate with radical ideas. To be sure, a tendency is not a rule. The largest factor driving election results is external world events: economic prosperity (or its absence), rallying around the flag in the event of a foreign attack, or widespread disgust with a failed war or major scandal. Midterm elections generally have large swings against the president’s party. One reason 2022 defied the pattern is that the Dobbs decision made Republicans, not Democrats, the party carrying out radical change. Candidates and parties seen as safe and moderate have an advantage — one that may not always override other factors but which matters quite a bit.

This is a fairly uncontroversial finding among political scientists.

I agree that this is a fairly uncontroversial finding among political scientists. See, for example, this unpublished paper with Jonathan Katz from 2007, and there’s a lot more literature on the topic.

Chait continues:

Yet in recent years, many influential figures in the Democratic Party had come to disbelieve it. A series of mistakes followed from this belief that Democrats would pay no penalty or may even benefit from moving farther away from the center.

I guess that some Democrats have this attitude, as do some Republicans. It’s natural to believe that the positions that you deeply hold would be shared by a majority of the population, if they were only given an opportunity to choose them. But I wonder if part of this, on both sides, is the rational calculation that moderation, while beneficial, doesn’t help that much, and so it can make sense in an election where you have a big advantage to run a more extreme candidate in order to get a policy benefit. That would explain the Republicans’ decision to choose extremist candidates in high-profile close races in 2022. Chait’s article has some interesting background on debates within the Democratic party on similar decisions in past elections.