Most legislative races are so far from being close that there’s essentially no practical electoral benefit from moderation. But there is the argument that if you run a lot of extremists all over t...

Peter Dorman writes:

Have you seen this? The debate is interesting in general, but I think you would be especially interested in the empirical claims about issue polls and their relationship to electoral outcomes. I [Dorman] have a concern that none of them address, the role of low propensity/engagement voters. My understanding is that in 2024 the Trump campaign acquired some secret sauce that enabled it to score *very* big among the low-pro’s. Whether that was engineered in some way or just pure luck (or some combination), we don’t know yet, but it played a crucial role. What interests me is that working class designation, generally by education, likely correlates tightly with being low engagement, to the extent that they would be almost impossible to disentangle in observational samples. Yet we hear a lot of pontificating based on the belief that the D’s lost a large chunk of the working class and have to do A, B or C to get it back. Maybe. But perhaps it’s about the distinctive characteristics of the low-pro’s, how they form their fluid political beliefs and what motivates them to get out and vote. And lurking in the background is the possibility that, already by mid-2024, the tech titans working for Trump had obtained backdoor access to social media accounts, allowing them to test content in low-pro samples in real time. If I had that capacity and I were them, that’s what I would have done.

The above-linked forum reminds me of this discussion of mine, “The WAR war and the electoral benefits of running more moderate candidates for political office.” The forum has a zillion discussants. I’m surprised they didn’t ask me for a comment!

Peter adds:

Normally, when we talk about measurement and construct error, we have a pretty clear idea in mind of what we want to be measuring, and then we compare our actual proxies to them. But with this debate about issue polling, it’s nearly the other way around. We *don’t* have a clear idea of what a political opinion or belief is, where it comes from or how it interacts with behavior, but we go out and get respondents to check a Likert box about an issue we’ve defined for them. My hunch is that social media data, which we’re not supposed to have, may come the closest to getting observations on beliefs — their formation, their trajectories, their interactions with other dimensions of social and political life — that we’re likely to get. If you control the platform you can even conduct experiments. That’s why I suspect that political operations that include Palantir et al. are probably at a huge advantage.

I don’t know how much that they can use that is more effective than what can be found in the voter file. But maybe.

The other thing is that the linked forum focuses on strategies for the Democrats. But the same ideas apply to the Republican party. Most legislative districts are so close that there’s essentially no practical electoral benefit from moderation. But there is the argument that if you run a lot of extremists all over the country, that this will make things harder for your party’s moderates in the few swing states and swing districts out there.