In January 2025, when the U.S. House took up legislation to bar trans women’s participation on women’s sports teams, all but two Democratic representatives — Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez — voted against the bill.
When the Senate took up a similar proposal three days ago, every Democrat present voted against it.
Why don’t more Democrats explicitly moderate their stands on transgender rights, immigration and other issues? Those who maintain far-out positions are well to the left of the electorate and its emblematic median voter. The trans issue clearly weakened Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, leaving her open to devastating pro-Trump ads.
In the case of one of the most disputed rights claimed by some parts of the transgender activist community — transgender women’s participation on women’s sports teams — Democrats have clear liberal grounds to challenge that claim, by asserting that they are protecting a woman’s right from unfair competition.
But this phenomenon — drifting far from the median voter — is hardly limited to the left. There are many factors behind the reluctance of both Democrats and Republicans to shift to the center.
For one thing, donors, especially the growing legions of small donors, prefer more extreme candidates. Adding additional pressure, what have come to be known as “the groups” — advocacy organizations on the left and the right — demand fealty to policies that are sometimes politically costly; they threaten to support primary challengers to run against those who defy their authority. On a psychological level, Democrats and liberals are morally committed to protecting marginalized groups from harm and defending racial and sexual minorities.
Before exploring these pressures, let’s go to the dominant political fact of life working against moderation, which is that there are decisive majorities in both the House and the Senate that have no interest in abandoning more extreme stands. Many Democrats and Republicans won their seats with the promise to fight the partisan opposition until hell freezes over.
The combination of partisan gerrymandering, the deepening of affective polarization — smoldering hatred of partisan adversaries — and the steadily growing number of safe seats has created a calculus encouraging, nurturing and fostering political positioning far to the left or right of the median voter.
The key piece of evidence: Of the 435 House districts, The Cook Political Report identifies 36 as competitive, broken down as 17 tossups, 15 leaning Democratic and four leaning Republican. Adding the eight likely Democratic and 17 likely Republican districts, which are much less likely to be competitive, brings the total to 61, or a measly 14 percent of all 435 members.
In this one-seventh of House districts that are at least somewhat competitive, there is a real payoff on Election Day for a candidate to moderate more extreme stands.
That is decidedly not the case in the remaining 86 percent of House districts — 374 of them, 189 solid Democratic and 185 solid Republican — that are not competitive, with the winner chosen in the primary and the general election a formality.
Candidates in these safe districts are under no pressure to moderate in order to win a general election, and primary voters are free to vote ideologically instead of strategically.
Senate races are less preordained, but still a majority are foregone conclusions, partywise: Nine to 11 states are considered battlegrounds, or “purple,” while 39 to 41, depending on who is doing the analysis, fall into the solid red or blue camp.
For a decisive majority of House members and a slightly less commanding majority of senators, then, the cost of adopting more extreme and intensely partisan stands drops close to zero, with a payoff in added voters in ideologically driven primaries.
What this comes down to is that in the calculations of incumbents in safe districts, adopting the hard-nosed position leaves no ideological space for challengers in the primaries.
In fact, among polarized primary electorates in these districts, the successful nominee is very likely to be naturally comfortable positioning himself or herself at the further end of the political spectrum, deeply hostile to the opposition party, opposed in principle to compromise.
What does this mean for moderation and bipartisanship? Many if not most members of the House and Senate reject them as a threat to their political future and as contrary to what they believe in.
This conclusion is based not only on extensive political research but also on actual voting patterns.
Michael Bailey, a political scientist at Georgetown, has found that moderation lifts candidates in competitive districts but penalizes those in noncompetitive districts.
In an email, Bailey explained, “The primary election systems in most states strongly encourage and reward more ideologically extreme behavior.” In an October 2025 paper, “Ideology, Party and Policy-Oriented Voting,” Bailey put it this way:
When control of the national legislature (Congress) is closely contested — as it is in the U.S. in recent years — extreme candidates win primary and general elections under a broad range of contexts, especially when the parties are highly polarized. Many districts will nominate and elect legislators who are more extreme than even the party median.
“When control of the legislature is closely contested and the policy impact of a single legislator is modest,” he wrote,
because party nominators know that the district median will prefer electing an extremist from a favored party than a moderate from a disfavored party.
For example, a moderately conservative district median voter will prefer the policy outcomes under Republican control, even if their individual legislator is very conservative, over the policy outcomes under Democratic control, with a moderate Democrat representing their district.
The ideological patterns in Congress are evident in state legislative contests, Bailey wrote, citing a May 2025 paper, “Polarization and State Legislative Elections,” by three political scientists, Cassandra Handan-Nader of N.Y.U., and Andrew C.W. Myers and Andrew B. Hall of Stanford. They wrote:
The polarization of the whole set of candidates seeking state legislative office has risen dramatically over the past two decades. The growing polarization of state legislators tracks the polarization of the set of candidates running for office quite tightly.
While “more moderate candidates enjoy a meaningful advantage in contested general elections, that advantage has declined somewhat in recent years. At the same time, more extreme candidates are favored in contested primary elections.”
The size of this advantage appears to be growing.
In an earlier version of their paper published four years ago in February 2022, Handan-Nader and her co-authors said:
On average, more extreme candidates receive higher vote share in primary elections, regardless of specification. The extremism variable is scaled to run from 0 to 1, and we estimate that shifting from the most moderate to the most extreme candidate predicts a seven or 10 percentage-point increase in vote share.
I asked Myers for the current estimate, and he emailed back:
We find that extreme candidates outperform moderates in primary elections. Specifically, we estimate that going from the most moderate to most extreme candidate in the primary predicts a 17 percentage point increase in vote share.
At the extreme, Ballotpedia found that in 2022, state legislative contests in 2,559 races (40.8 percent) were uncontested — that is, one of the two major parties didn’t even bother to nominate a candidate.
In other words, in four of every 10 state legislative contests, two-party competition, a foundation of American democracy, does not exist.
Another closely related force working against moderation is the rapid demographic changes taking place within the Democratic Party, particularly the growing strength and numbers of well-educated, very liberal voters.
Ruy Teixeira, a political analyst and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, took a long look at this development in a March 12 posting on the Liberal Patriot Substack “The Democrats’ White Liberal Problem”:
Cast your mind back to the beginning of the century. At that point, a mere 28 percent of Democrats described themselves as liberal and two-thirds were either moderate or conservative.
Fast forward to today and the liberal share has more than doubled, to 59 percent, while the moderate/conservative share has declined drastically. It’s the liberals’ party now. And especially, it’s the white liberals’ party now.
How have white liberals changed?
In 2000, white Democrats who were moderate or conservative outnumbered white liberal Democrats by about two to one. Today that relationship has been reversed. White liberal Democrats now outnumber moderate/conservative white Democrats by about two to one.
The result: The balance of power within the party has moved in a decisively leftward direction:
From being merely a voice, albeit an important one, in the Democratic choir, white liberals are now directing the choir and imposing their culture, preferences and priorities on the party as a whole.
Any Democrat seeking the presidential nomination, Teixeira continued,
has to reckon with this enormous bloc of Democrats, whose influence is enhanced beyond their considerable numbers by their dominance of the party’s infrastructure, allied NGOs and advocacy groups, and left-leaning media, foundations and academia. Not to mention the money — ambitious Democrats need money, and white liberals are a reliable source of cash for politicians who press the right buttons.
This clarifies why it is so difficult for Democratic politicians to carve out a truly moderate path.
What else pushes Democrats to the left? Cash.
In their July 23, 2025, Wall Street Journal article, “AOC, Mamdani and Progressives Rake In Cash as Democrats Remain Divided: Far Left’s Prolific Fund-Raising Shows Appeal to Party’s Base,” John McCormick and Anthony DeBarros wrote:
Among the 10 incumbent Democrats who raised the most from individual donors this year, six are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a Wall Street Journal analysis of campaign finance disclosures shows. Three of the top four are progressives, with the exception of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.).
The financial strength among progressives presents a challenge to party leaders trying to nudge the Democratic message closer to the middle, where they might stand a better chance of winning over independent voters who decide close elections.
The one issue that has rapidly gained salience in the Democratic debate over moderation is transgender rights.
There is overwhelming evidence from polling that strong majorities of the electorate oppose discrimination against trans men and women in employment and education, reinforced by a firm conviction that trans people should be treated as equal members of society.
At the same time, majorities of voters oppose allowing trans women to join women’s sports teams, to allow trans men and women to use bathrooms based on their gender identity and to allow the assignment of criminally convicted trans women to women’s prisons.
Victor Kumar, a professor of philosophy at Boston University, argued in a July 2025 essay published on his Substack Open Questions that the backlash against the trans movement was
exacerbated by tactical errors. It was a mistake to insist that any concern about youth medical transition is transphobic. To habitually take the bait on marginal issues like trans-inclusive sport, particularly at elite levels. To deny that cis women can reasonably desire sex-segregated spaces in locker rooms, shelters and prisons. To adopt a maximalist politics of pronouns that shames people for honest mistakes.
Going into the midterm elections and the presidential contest two years from now, there is what can best be called a widespread churning in Democratic and liberal circles over transgender issues.
The Searchlight Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank founded last year, published “The Path Forward for Transgender Rights” on Thursday, a call for retrenchment on trans issues by Mara Keisling, the now retired founding executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality and a senior fellow at Searchlight. Keisling wrote:
There is broad support for protecting trans people from discrimination in housing, access to credit, employment and for ensuring that adults have access to the health care they need.
That said, Americans hold conservative attitudes where certain policies related to gender identity and transgender rights are concerned. Voters are especially focused on kids — from the bathrooms they use to the sports teams they may join, and access to hormone treatments and other forms of health care.
What, then, should the transgender movement do? Keisling:
We need to reset our approach to advocacy, public education and policy development regarding the rights and acceptance of transgender Americans. This means shifting our primary focus to education while continuing to try to enshrine core civil rights protections into statute.
On issues such as sports participation and kids’ access to health care, we should accept that we have more work to do to win hearts and minds, and focus on pursuing the smartest possible approach to bring more Americans over to our side.
The intense desire among Democratic voters to win puts some wind behind Keisling’s views, especially in the 61 competitive (or at least somewhat competitive) House districts, 28 of which are currently held by Democrats. Those races will determine which party controls the House in 2027. But given the power of the forces against moderation in the 374 safe districts, her agenda will be easier to admire than enact.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Why Are So Many Democratic Politicians So Far Out of Touch? appeared first on New York Times.
