President Donald Trump has brought American democracy to the brink. But Democrats should not moderate any of their positions, for the sake of disempowering him.
This is a popular pair of positions among progressives, despite the apparent tension between them.
As the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, a Vox co-founder, argued last week, many of those most alarmed by Trump “don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win.”
Klein’s perspective isn’t hard to understand. There are inevitably trade-offs between political expediency and ideological purity. The less deference you give to public opinion, the greater your risk of electoral defeat. If failing to win the next two federal elections would imperil democracy itself, then erring on the side of ideological restraint seems prudent.
More concretely, to stop Trump from further consolidating his power over the judiciary, Democrats will need to win a Senate majority next year. And doing that will likely require, among other things, winning statewide elections in North Carolina, Ohio, and Iowa — all states that voted for Trump three times, the latter two by double digits in 2024. Making the Democratic Party more palatable in those places plausibly requires embracing more conservative issue positions.
Progressives have a few different answers to this argument. But the most sophisticated comes from the political scientists Jake Grumbach and Adam Bonica. In their telling, there is no contradiction between opposing Republican authoritarianism and Democratic moderation — because the latter does not actually confer significant political benefits.
Grumbach and Bonica have advanced this case in a series of articles and papers (one of which I covered previously). But their most prominent intervention came last month, in a Substack post titled “Do Moderates Do Better?” In that piece, the political scientists make two primary arguments:
Other political data analysts have pushed back on Bonica and Grumbach’s claims. The statistician Nate Silver argues that they use an unreliable measure of candidate ideology and undersell the benefits of moderation in their models. The pollster Lakysha Jain insists that Bonica and Grumbach grossly underestimate the correlation between moderation and electoral success by ignoring a widely accepted rule of political science.
I have not taken a math class since I was 18 years old, so I can’t speak with much authority about these quants’ methodological disputes. Instead, I want to focus on a big-picture point: Even if Bonica and Grumbach’s empirical work is perfectly accurate, it does not actually show what they say it does.
Specifically, the political scientists suggest that Democrats have little to gain from moderating their positions nationally. But their findings do not prove this — and their own theoretical arguments actually call it into question.
Why moderation might not pay like it used to
Bonica and Grumbach have a theory for why moderation is no longer advantageous in House races. They write:
Decades ago when “all politics was local,” a candidate’s moderation likely carried significant benefits. In the Trump era, by contrast, elections are driven by national tides, candidate charisma, and anti-establishment credibility—qualities that neither political consultants nor academics know how to manufacture.
It is worth noting that Grumbach and Bonica display a selective demand for rigor here. When it comes to moderation, they insist that correlation is not causation: Even if moderates did outperform progressives in House races, they argue, that wouldn’t necessarily prove that centrism is beneficial. After all, moderate candidates might disproportionately possess some other key advantage, unrelated to their ideology. Thus, in Bonica and Grumbach’s view, before anyone can say that moderation is advantageous, they need to perform elaborate statistical analyses, using cutting-edge scientific methods.
And yet, moments after arguing this, the political scientists feel comfortable asserting that “anti-establishment credibility” drives electoral success in the Trump era. This is odd, since Bonica and Grumbach present no evidence that such credibility even correlates with better results, much less that it causes them.
Putting this aside, one aspect of Grumbach and Bonica’s theory makes good sense: It’s doubtlessly true that politics has become more “nationalized” over the past three decades. With the rise of cable and the internet, local newspapers and television stations have steadily bled influence to nationally oriented media.
This leads voters to view House races through the prism of national politics — which in turn reduces the benefits of moderation downballot: A local newspaper will give significant attention to an area’s Democratic congressional candidate, and any idiosyncratic policy positions she might adopt. TikTok and Fox News, by contrast, tend to direct attention toward the Democratic Party’s national brand, which is shaped by both its leadership and its most high-profile members (voters in rural Ohio are almost certainly more familiar with Zohran Mamdani than with their district’s Democratic House candidates).
As a result, downballot Democrats today are less able to distinguish themselves from their party. They can embrace heterodox positions that are popular in their district. But voters won’t necessarily learn about those stances, much less give them greater weight than their feelings about Democrats in general.
So, it’s plausible that House and Senate candidates have less to gain from moderation today than they did in the past. Theoretically, it is even possible that the benefits of downballot moderation have all but disappeared, as Bonica and Grumbach claim.
And yet, even if we stipulate that they are correct on that point, their ultimate conclusion — that moderation would not be helpful to Democrats nationally — still doesn’t follow.
A national party embracing heterodox positions and an individual House candidate doing so are two different things
The debate over whether Democrats would benefit from moderating is in large part about national politics. For many, the most important question is: Would our party win more elections if its current congressional leadership — and/or 2028 presidential nominee — adopted more centrist positions on salient issues?
And yet, when political scientists intervene in this debate, they tend to do so by looking at what happens when rank-and-file House candidates move to the center.
This focus is understandable. Every two years, there are 435 House elections, featuring a diverse array of Democratic candidates. That generates enough data points to draw statistically significant relationships between ideology and performance.
By contrast, there have been only 20 presidential elections since World War II. You can’t derive a robust statistical analysis from the observation that Democrats did pretty well after moderating in 1996 (nor from the fact that Republicans gained support while becoming more ideologically extreme in 1980). Thus, there may be no better way to empirically test theories of electability than to scrutinize House results.
But such results can only tell us so much.
A national political party embracing a more moderate agenda and an individual House candidate doing so are two very different things. And there’s no reason to assume that the political consequences of the first would be the same as the second.
To the contrary, Bonica and Grumbach’s own theory suggests otherwise. In their account, moderating did have significant benefits in House races back when “all politics was local” — which is to say, when voters paid close attention to local politics (and thus, House candidates’ positioning).
This indicates that the benefits of moderation may scale with attention: The more salient a candidate’s heterodoxy is to voters, the more likely they will be to reward her for it. If so, then we would expect presidential moderation to have far larger effects than the downballot variety. After all, we live in a world where voters pay more attention to the parties’ national brands than to the positioning of their House candidates.
Bonica’s past research lends some credence to this reasoning. In a working paper from earlier this year, he found that centrists enjoyed a bigger advantage over progressives in presidential races than in House ones.
Therefore, even if Grumbach and Bonica were right, and there is no longer any benefit to downballot moderation, this wouldn’t necessarily refute the case for ideological restraint. To the contrary, if it’s true that Democratic candidates in red and purple areas can no longer project distinct ideological identities, then it may be more imperative — not less — for the party to moderate its national positions.
Adopting moderate positions on some issues could be electorally helpful, even if being more moderate is not
There is one other reason why Grumbach and Bonica’s results don’t settle the debate over moderation’s efficacy: They are measuring the benefits of being more “moderate” across-the-board, not those of moving to the center on select issues.
And yet, when Democrats argue about whether their party should moderate, they are typically fighting about the latter. Many progressives oppose Democrats moving rightward in any policy domain. Center-left pundits, meanwhile, insist that the party would benefit by embracing more conservative stances on specific issues, where Democrats are currently to the left of voter sentiment.
You cannot disprove the latter view through Bonica and Grumbach’s methods. Attempting to do so amounts to conflating two distinct questions:
These questions could have different answers. On some issues, the progressive position is more popular than the moderate one (for example, voters overwhelmingly support Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to cap credit card interest rates). Theoretically, moderate House candidates could benefit from their more conservative positions on say, immigration and crime, while losing votes for being excessively centrist on economic issues. In that case, it could simultaneously be true that moderate Democrats don’t outperform progressive ones — and that the Democratic Party would gain votes by moving right on policing and immigration enforcement.
To be clear, I am not asserting that any of that is necessarily true, only that it is logically possible. In principle, adopting popular positions (whether progressive or centrist) could be politically helpful, even if holding more-moderate-on-average stances is not.
And there is evidence that aligning your policies with voters’ preferences is still politically helpful, even in today’s information environment. In one recent study, voters became 14 percentage points more likely to support a congressional candidate after learning that they agreed with them on an issue.
This is not a good time for sloppy reasoning about political trade-offs
I think it’s possible to reconcile alarm at Trump’s authoritarianism with opposition to Democratic moderation. For example, one could believe that the president is in the process of sabotaging the economy, and that a massive recession will propel Democrats back to power, no matter what positions they adopt. In that case, a maximally progressive Democratic Party may be preferable to a maximally popular one: The important thing is assembling Senate and House majorities comprised of true believers, who will be willing to implement the bold reforms that America needs (and which could theoretically reduce the appeal of Trumpian illiberalism in the long run).
Nevertheless, in this perilous moment, it’s vital for Democrats not to underestimate the risks of ideological inflexibility. Perhaps, the hazards of forgoing any and all moderation are negligible, as Grumbach and Bonica suggest. But their work does not actually prove as much. And Democrats shouldn’t operate on the impression that it does.
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