Outside the Beltway

A Return to the Median Voter

Steven L. Taylor · Monday, February 16, 2026 · 1 comment

Henry Farrell, writing at Progammable Mutter (what a great name for a newsletter!), has a lengthy but very worthwhile essay, The Median Voter Theorem is a Clarity Trap. The piece does an excellent job of getting to some key problems with the median voter model in a way that I have tried to articulate in the past,* but he really hits the nail on the head in ways I failed to do. Further, he provides what I think is an excellent set of arguments against a lot of the poll-driven/consultant class recommendations that lead to things like “popularlism,” focuses on messaging, or arguments that all the Democrats need to do is “moderate” a la folks like Matthew Yglesias.

I would note that Farrell describes himself as “lefty,” but that piece is not about why the Democrats should shift leftward, but is instead an argument for experimentation:

What I would like to see people paying real attention to is a third disagreement, which lurks beneath both the statistics and the politics. Should the Democratic party be sticking to tried-and-tested techniques (based on the standard metrics and assumptions) for attracting voters, or should it be trying new stuff out? At the moment, this fight very loosely maps onto the other two, because moderates are (a) the faction that would most visibly lose if the party starts experimenting with new ideas, and (b) are intellectually tied to a broader metric-driven approach that is shared across much of the business world, technology, and, perhaps weirdly depending on how you think about them, sports.

It seems worth noting that “experimenting” doesn’t necessarily mean shifting leftward. Indeed, the notion in and of itself is ideologically neutral. But what I really want to focus on here is the degree to which I think Farrell correctly notes the way a lot of “moderates” hew to the notion of poll-driven consultation as the best means of conducting electoral campaigns.

Farrell directly teases all this out deeper in the essay:

If you forget the assumptions and treat the median voter theorem instead as a guide to party strategy, it is incredibly attractive to moderates. The median voter theorem entails that there is one weird trick to winning elections: always move towards the center. If you are a rational politician, you always need to asking yourself (and the polls), what the voter right at the center is looking for. If you give the median voter what they want, you will win. You don’t have to worry about voters on the left (if you are a Democrat) or the right (if you are a Republican). They will vote for you, because you are the party that is closest to them, even if they think that you are a centrist sellout. You should absolutely ignore what various identity groups are telling you about what to do – their advice is at best misleading and at worst treacherous and dangerous.

We are all well aware of this kind of “one weird trick” strategizing. It is the essence of what I argue against when the argument on the table is centered around “messaging.” You know, if only Dems were more moderate, or at least silent, on trans rights, or if only no one, anywhere, had ever said “latinx” or “defund the police.” And why couldn’t Dems have been more hawkish on the border?!

But consultants are going to consult and do things like pretend that the problem is, you know, too much faculty lounge jargon, or something.

Keep in mind, I still think that most voters vote their partisan identity, and that a lot of swing voters base their vote on factors largely outside the actual contents of campaigns. Having said that, I am not arguing that campaigns are irrelevant (just a lot less consequential than most people think). I am saying that just trying to adhere to a poll-driven, median-voter moderatism is a pretty sterile way to campaign and evolve a political party. More importantly, it leads to a political party that, when it wins power, tries to govern in that same fashion: don’t upset the mythical moderates lest ye lose next time! It is a great recipe for getting nothing of consequence done, even in the face of massive, obvious challenges (see, e.g., the Democratically controlled Congress in 2021-2022 and Chuck Schumer’s current lukewarm approach to fixing ICE).

Note: the issues of governance are not what Farrell is writing about, but I think it is important nonetheless, especially since governing is supposed to be the point of winning elections (although the goal clearly is more about winning again–which points to core flaws in our institutional design given that there appears to insufficient connection between needing to govern well if one wants to be re-elected–but that’s the subject of dozens of other posts, past and future).

If you need a reminder of what the median voter theorem is, Farrell provides.

Imagine two shopkeepers that want to maximize sales, but both have to locate their store on the same street. They know that customers are likely to frequent the shop that is closest to them. That means that the shop that is located just a little bit closer to the middle part of the street will get slightly more customers than the one that is further away. Like many influential economic models, this one has an equilibrium, a final state that rational economic actors will converge on. The rival shop owner will have an incentive to relocate their own store a little closer to the center, to grab back some customers. This then plausibly leads the first shop to move too. Eventually, the two shops will end up side by side, bang in the middle of the street. That is the equilibrium where there is no possible better move that an actor can make.

For the Median Voter Theorem, imagine a version of this model, where instead of shops you have political parties, instead of customers you have voters, and instead of a street, you have a single ideological dimension on which the parties and voters locate themselves. Again, you assume that voters vote for the party whose position on this one-dimensional continuum is closest to them. And much the same thing happens. Over time, parties too are likely to converge towards the central point, so that each is in its best possible position to maximize vote share. The Median Voter Theorem then makes a simple prediction. Rational parties, if they want to win elections, will necessarily pursue the median voter right at the center (according to one measure) of the political spectrum. Whoever attracts the median voter will win a majority. Hence, parties that want to win ought become centrists.

If one thinks that politics is a simple continuum from left to right, then this is a powerfully appealing notion. But, as Farrell notes, politics is characterized by multiple issues, not just one. As such, a key problem with the strategizing around the “median voter” is that the theory assumes that voters more to the left or the right of the median position have no choice but to vote for the candidates closer to them. For example, what else is a left-oriented voter going to do in a race between a moderate D and a MAGA R? Obviously, they will vote moderate D, right? Well, not only could they decide to go third party, but they might just stay home. The model is made all the weaker when we consider that there isn’t just one issue in a given election, but many. There is a reason why the long-fabled “fiscally conservative but socially moderate” candidate/party has not emerged. It may be the position that many pundits see as the obvious moderate stance, but the reality is that in a binary choice, voters often have to privilege specific issues (if not simply long-standing identities) when deciding their vote.

Put another way: the median positions on immigration, taxation, trans rights, and affirmative action may not converge. Moreover, any given voter has differing levels of understanding of each issue, and almost certainly values some issues more than others. We are seeing, for example, that while a lot of people do, in fact, want the “worst of the worst” arrested and deported, they have qualms about masked ICE agents roaming the streets of Minneapolis, among other issues with the Trump administration’s immigration policy. It is one thing to poll people on immigration and find out that they want the laws followed, and criminals deported (a hardly shocking finding), but that doesn’t mean that the easy way to win elections is to just parrot those findings on the stump, nor does it mean that the public will like and all implementations of deportation policy. As G. Elliot Morris keeps noting, public opinion on this topic has shifted.

And never forget that at the end of the day, voters mostly vote based on partisan identity, not on a specific basket of policy possibilities.

I am not in opposition to the notion that there is a policy space in a given district upon which you can map at least some level of understanding of the likely policy preferences of its voters. But as I have noted before, even if we stake a simplistic assumption about the “median voter” into account, the reality is that the median voter in a given district or state is not going to occupy the same ideological space. The median voter in Mississippi is positionally different from the median voter in Vermont, for example. That is to say that even if the median voter model is an appropriate representation of reality, the median voter is in a mathematically different place based on the makeup of a district or state. And we have no national elections, and so public opinion polling aimed at a national median voter is problematic in its own right.

Whenever I think about these kinds of discussions, I can’t help but remember that many pundits thought that Eric Adams, the former Mayor of NYC, was the kind of candidate that Democrats should pursue in the future because of his tough-on-crime stances in the face of perceived backlash against “defund the police.” And now his successor is a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist. I note this not to say that a lot can be derived from NYC mayoral elections (as I have argued before), but instead to note what a failure of analysis, reflexive moderation was in terms of assessing the meaning of Adams by some pundits.

Ultimately, I think that Farrell is correctly noting that the consultant class, and its obsession with polling, is a major problem for contemporary Democrats.

I think that Farrell is correct that all of this leads to the median voter being a clarity trap. Farrell borrows the concept of a “clarity trap” from C. Thi Nguyen’s new book, The Score.

So here is a recipe for a seductive clarity trap:

First, build a belief system that offers a satisfyingly clear, coherent explanation of the world.

Second, make sure the belief system conceals any evidence of its own error.

Farrell then elaborates, correctly in my view.

The median voter theorem, and a set of closely associated ideas have become a clarity trap for Democratic moderates. They offer a simple, clear explanation of what the Democratic party always ought do. Moderate! Move to the center! Figure out what the median voter wants, and do just that! And they also offer a means of concealing errors. Whenever Democrats fail to win elections, it is definitionally due to their failure to observe this universally sound advice. Very obviously, they have been listening closely to the groups and failing to pay attention to rigorously conducted opinion surveys, which are the true and proper barometer of what the public wants.

There are other diagnoses that seem to me more plausible. Public opinion is not, actually fixed in the ways that the median voter theorem suggests, even if they are not nearly as protean as people on the left might want them to be. The more that political parties rely on metrics and other simplifications, the more they are likely to be blindsided by voters whose wants and ideas are not readily captured by simple measures.

All of which he well summarizes in his conclusion

The median voter theorem is politically attractive to them because it reflects their political priors so perfectly, making it very hard to give up. Again: this also explains why it is liable to be a particularly vicious clarity trap. Who would not prefer to have the world clarified in ways that suggest that everyone who does not converge on their own preferred political philosophy is stupid, wicked or dishonest? It is in the nature of clarity traps that they continue to seem compelling even as they draw you ever closer to the brink of the abyss. It is really hard to escape this kind of trap, especially if you have built your identity around it. But it can be done, and doing it opens up new possibilities.

To me, I think that the bottom line is that Democrats, writ large, and the consultant class (and pundit class in large measure) need to realize that while poll-driven analysis of the median voter may be incredibly appealing, it is not the best way to approach 2026 nor 2028. Not only is there a lot of the outcome that is out of the hands of campaigns (e.g., no campaign created the inflation that made so many voters mad in 2024), but the focus needs to be less on some allegedly perfectly calibrated campaign message that avoids all the wrong terms and tickles moderate ears appropriately, but rather on thoughts about actually governing.

At the barest of minimums, Farrell is correct to note how a poll-derived median voter strategy is a clarity trap that too many pundits and consultants fall into. I would further note that I do not think one can argue that the GOP has been behaving as if a poll-tested, median voter-seeking strategy is the way to go, and they currently control the White House, the Senate, and the House. Further, there is something going on with crazy swings in special elections that seems to have little to do with carefully calibrated moderation. And above all else, I want to stress that timid politics designed not to upset anyone leads to timid governance at a moment when we need bold leadership to tackle very serious problems.

At any rate, I know this was long, and that I have already noted the Farrell’s post is also long, but I still recommend it in full.

*See these two posts: On Appealing to the “Median Voter” and On the Median Voter.