Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach are right that moderation is not a panacea of political strategy, despite its recent embrace by center-left Democratic pundits and even the New York Times editorial board.

But I think they can be even stronger in their condemnation of mainstream strategy. The entire debate—moderate versus progressive, centrist versus left, abundance versus populism, whatever you’d like to call it—constitutes an elite discourse largely disconnected from how most voters actually reason about politics. This leads well-meaning politicians, consultants, and political activists to make strategic errors that cost the party votes and impact.

First, the conversation generally ignores uncertainty, to its peril. As Bonica and Grumbach note, last August I too published an analysis employing Wins Above Replacement modeling for U.S. House candidates, and what I found corroborates their central claim. Shifting from the median Democratic congressperson’s ideology to that of a moderate such as Maine’s Jared Golden yields approximately 1.4 percentage points on vote margin—a premium that has declined by roughly 80 percent since 2000.

This effect is not negligible, but neither is it determinative. In 2024 Democrats lost four House races by margins under 1.5 percentage points. In each case, the Democratic nominee already positioned to the right of the average Democratic representative. These candidates did not lose due to insufficient moderation. They lost because other factors—incumbency, the prevailing political environment, fundraising capacity, candidate-district congruence—exert effects that dwarf ideological positioning. I estimate impacts of incumbency, experience, and fundraising that exceed that of ideology by a factor of at least two.

More fundamentally, the confidence interval surrounding that 1.4-point estimate is substantial. Depending on model specification and the comparison group employed, the premium could plausibly range from near zero to approximately three points. This uncertainty is not a methodological limitation to be overcome—it reflects the genuine difficulty of isolating ideological effects from candidate quality, local conditions, and campaign competence. Anyone claiming to know with precision how much moderation “buys” is overstating what the evidence permits.

Second, the moderation debate obscures a more fundamental problem: the dominant Washington model of voter decision-making is empirically flawed.

I term this the Strategist’s Fallacy—the erroneous assumption that voters reason like political scientists and elite strategists, and that preferences observed today will persist through subsequent electoral cycles. This framework presumes voters maintain coherent issue positions and ideological self-conceptions, then select candidates through a matching process analogous to consumer choice. The strategic implication follows directly: measure policy preferences, adopt the modal position, and electoral success will follow. The model possesses intuitive appeal, both because it’s an idealized picture of democracy and because it mirrors how strategists themselves reason.

But the model just isn’t right. One fundamental mistake lies in treating the electorate’s preferences as more static than they really are, which leads to projecting more stability in the short term than we should. A second lies in treating the mass public’s preferences as highly coherent and almost entirely predictive of voting behavior. Bonica and Grumbach point out the obsolescence of the “median voter theorem,” and mine is a similar critique. Political scientist Philip Converse demonstrated six decades ago that only approximately 10 to 15 percent of the electorate thinks in genuinely ideological terms. The remainder votes based on group identities, economic perceptions, or affective responses that resist ideological categorization. In my own survey research, respondents who appear “moderate” frequently are not centrists in any meaningful sense—they score at the midpoint because they provide no ideological content whatsoever.

Moreover, I have found there is a hidden “non-ideological” dimension in American political behavior running from ideology-driven to circumstances-driven voting. In 2025, some 38 percent of Americans reported wanting parties to focus on affordability and material well-being rather than any sort of ideological agenda. For these persuadable voters, whether a candidate is “moderate” or “progressive” is simply not a salient consideration. The entire elite debate is orthogonal to their concerns.

The evolution of immigration politics over the past year illustrates the Strategist’s Fallacy with particular clarity. Early last year, Matthew Yglesias and others counseled Democrats to avoid talking about immigration. Their reasoning was straightforward: immigration represented Trump’s strongest issue, and Democratic activists drawing attention to cases like Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s—a Maryland father unlawfully deported to El Salvador—were increasing the “salience” of a topic that allegedly damaged the party’s electoral position. Democrats should redirect attention elsewhere, they said.

This strategic advice assumed voters’ preferences on immigration were so rigid that Democratic messaging could not influence them. It treated public opinion as a fixed fact of political reality, not an object that was going to move in the short term or that could be moved. And it ascribed too much influence over voting decisions to issue attitudes.

But opinion did shift substantially. Over Trump’s first year, as deportation enforcement operations became visible—workplace raids, family separations, detention of American citizens—and now both Renee Good and Alex Pretti have been killed, net approval of ICE has declined by more than 30 points, from +16 last February to –20 last month. Support for abolishing the agency reached historic highs in January 2026, according to polling data from Civiqs. Contrary to Yglesias, Democrats who advocated for Abrego Garcia did not harm their party’s position. They helped define Trump’s immigration enforcement in maximally unfavorable terms.

The strategists who urged silence were fighting the previous war, optimizing for the median voter around election time in November 2024 rather than anticipating how sentiment could change. And change it did. In the intervening elections, Democrats achieved statewide victories across ideologically diverse states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New Jersey—despite their nominees maintaining left-leaning positions on issues including immigration, abortion access, and health care. Current forecasts indicate strong prospects for recapturing the House in 2026, with potential Senate gains (though the latter remains a more difficult proposition).

The lesson is not that progressive positions are invariably correct. It’s that the conventional strategic approach—diagnosing median voter preferences at present and adopting corresponding positions—treats public opinion as too static, even over the short term. Issues undergo redefinition. Events transform how voters interpret policy. Strategists who conceptualize electoral success as static positioning will perpetually lag one cycle behind.

Where does this analysis leave Democratic strategy? Not within a “moderate more” or “move left” framework. Both approaches assume voters function as ideological processors matching platforms to preference orderings. On this dimension, Bonica and Grumbach usefully recommend emphasizing issues that transcend the conventional left-right spectrum—policies capable of appealing to swing voters without requiring moderation on core commitments. This is how Trump won the 2016 election: by running against elites and the status quo, rather than to the center on, say, taxes or abortion.

An alternative approach might follow two principles. First, party actors should rigorously forecast the trajectory of public opinion rather than merely measuring its current location and speculating about its high or low rate of change—often enough a vibes-based or unempirical judgment that can smuggle in an analyst’s own preferences. The public may grow still more skeptical of deportation policies over 2026. Anger over tariffs may intensify. Economic conditions will shape the electoral terrain more decisively than any policy platform. What can party actors do today to push policy in their direction—or position themselves where they think the public will be by the next election?

Second, party actors ought to acknowledge uncertainty in the empirical studies of voting behavior, even in good-faith attempts to forecast movement in the future. This uncertainty discomforts strategists who seek determinate playbooks, but recognizing it is the only way for long-term success in balancing data-driven and politics-driven campaign considerations. Acknowledging uncertainty also creates space for something more important: grounding political decisions in values and democratic norms rather than in an overly mechanistic model of preference aggregation.

Finally, it is worth restating that a huge factor, arguably the most decisive, in Democrats’ loss in 2024 was that economic conditions felt adverse under an incumbent administration—the same pattern that punished incumbents across dozens of democracies worldwide in 2024 and pushed Americans to the left in 2025. This outcome reflects no ideological failure. It reflects the fundamental dynamics of democratic accountability.

Bonica and Grumbach are correct that the empirical case for moderation has largely collapsed. But the more significant lesson from our collective work is that the entire moderate-progressive debate constitutes an elite construction—one that projects the strategist’s hyperideological conception of politics onto an electorate that predominantly does not reason in those terms. When one abandons the pretense of optimizing one’s way to electoral victory, something clarifying emerges: the necessity of determining what one actually believes, and campaigning accordingly. That, after all, is what democratic politics is supposed to entail.