Ok, so it occurs to me (and I know everyone has been wondering about this!) why I find almost all popular press usage of the term “median voter” to grate on my nerves (this includes outlets like FiveThirtyEight, which should be more precise than they are). I think the main problem is that pundits have a habit of talking about appealing to the median national voter, but there are, alas, no elections in the United States wherein competition would be for the median American.
As a general matter, I think that the problem is that the binary nature of our party system coupled with the single-seat, winner-take-all nature of our politics makes everyone think in 1s and 0s and also assumes that undecided or independent must mean “in the moderate middle.” That is, being near the median doesn’t make you undecided, and being undecided doesn’t necessarily mean you are near the median voter’s position. You can be a radical left independent or a far-right undecided.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, I wrote about it here (On the Median Voter) back in November.
First, let’s remember that the word “median” means the middle of a distribution in the sense that half of the distribution is on the left-hand side and half is on the right-hand side. Note the simple set of examples below (source). If what is being measured is ideological policy preferences (or simply partisan distribution of a district) the policy preferences of the “median voter” would be different in all three districts.
The simple point I am trying to make is that being the median voter does not mean you would adhere to a specific set of ideological positions. It means that your positions are relative to the distribution of voter preferences in the district (or country) in question.
So, let me underscore two thoughts.
First, the ideological position of the “median voter” depends on the distribution being discussed.
The median voter in TX04, which voted 74.9% for Trump in 2020, is ideologically quite different than the median voter in NY07, which voted 81.8% for Biden in 2020.
In other words, “median voter” does not mean “moderate” save in the context of the given distribution.
Second, an undecided voter is not necessarily proximate to the “median voter.”
There is an accepted wisdom that undecided voters are moderate voters near to the median position of the country (or district). But there is no reason why an undecided voter might not be a far-left or far-right voter (or have heterodox views). Indeed, it should be pretty clear that a decent slice of undecided voters really may not have a clear ideological position. If they were more ideologically coherent, they probably wouldn’t be undecided. This isn’t to say that some undecided aren’t high-information moderates. Some are. But if you listen to most discourse on this topic, there is an assumption that most (if not all) undecideds fall into that category.
Along these lines I have written about this before:
- In 2019 I wrote On “Independent” Voters, which looked at who self-identified “independents” were and found that most of them are partisan leaners and only 9% of the overall electorate, according to Pew Research, and that group is less inclined to vote than other groups identified.
- In 2022 I noted a piece by Lee Drutman that discussed moderate/independent voters, Speaking of Moderates and Independents…, which underscored, again, that the notion that those folks are just waiting in “the middle” to be plucked up by the side with the “correct” strategy is a myth.
- Also in 2022, I noted the disjuncture between stated partisan preferences and actual voting: Partisan ID in the United States.
- I discussed some of the other problems with the median voter theorem here in April of this year: Nope Labels.
dl;dr: Independents don’t necessarily mean Moderates nor Centrists and may or may not be close to the Median Voter. There may well be overlap, but each one of those things is not a synonym for the other.
A last thought: it is far easier to track and understand how a voter fits in terms of closeness to the median on a given issue such as abortion (as I noted in the post On the Median Voter). We have seen in single-issue elections that the median voter is likely to support abortion rights. But many of those voters who vote to support abortion rights in a given state also vote Republican for office, even though the Democratic candidate is closer to them (and the median voter) on the topic of abortion.
As such, the problem is that voters contain multitudes when it comes to policy and political preference, so admonitions by pundits that politicians should “appeal to the median voter” are just wildly simplistic. Indeed, this problem accrues to the notion of “appeal to the moderates” as well.
(And apologies, as I expect people would have preferred something about the DNC, but kudos for getting to this apology).
