The Moderate Middle Is A Myth
Prepare yourself for the inevitable commentary, likely no matter who wins in 2020: Independent voters decided the election. Or better yet, moderate voters decided the election.
These tropes conjure up a particular image of a pivotal bloc of “reasonable” and “independent” voters sick of the two major parties, just waiting for a centrist candidate to embrace a “moderate” policy vision. And there’s a reason this perception persists. Topline polling numbers show 40-plus percent of Americans refusing to identify as either Democratic or Republican and close to 40 percent calling themselves moderate.
But topline polling numbers mask an underlying diversity of political thought that is far more complicated. (We looked at this in depth in late 2019.)
Some self-identified independents are market-oriented and anti-immigration. More are the opposite. Many are consistent liberals on economic and immigration policy questions. Some are consistent conservatives. Others are somewhere in the middle.
So, next time anybody says that some policy position will win over genuine independent voters, they aren’t addressing an obvious question: Which independent voters?
And are independents also moderate? It depends how you define “moderate.” If you define moderates based on self-identification, then the answer is: sort of. More than half (58 percent) of self-identified independents also identify as moderate, compared to 27 percent who identify as conservative and just 15 percent who identify as liberal, according to data from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, a research consortium that works with YouGov to conduct large-scale surveys. But many people who call themselves “moderate” do not rate as moderate on policy issues.
Just like self-identified independents, moderates come from all over the ideological space, including moderates who also identify as independent.
So the bottom line is this: If you hear a pundit talking about how independent voters or moderate voters decided the election, you have it on good authority that you should ask which independents and which moderates.