After a tumultuous and dramatic election, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the most boring and important facts about American politics, like how more voters identify as conservative than liberal.
This is a fundamental structural problem for Democrats, who need to win over large majorities of self-identified moderates without alienating their base. A new post-election survey from center-left think tank Third Way that looks at voters in presidential battleground states reveals that voters picked Donald Trump over Kamala Harris for the extremely boring reason that they saw him as closer to their ideological views and not that they saw her as some wild-eyed radical.
Harris’s score of 2.5 on a 0-10 ideological spectrum places her squarely in the middle of the left-of-center coalition. That’s consistent with her history as a Democrat who ran to the left in 2019 when that was the general trend in the party but then returned closer to the center as vice president. Trump, at 7.8, was seen as somewhat further off center. Nonetheless, voters placed themselves considerably closer to Trump because they see themselves as on the whole right-of-center.
Such ideological abstractions only tell you so much. Fifteen years ago, a person who accepted marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples would have been to the left of most Democrats. Today, though it’s still surely something many Republicans oppose, it’s not a topic of active controversy. Medicare privatization was at the heart of Republican politics in the 2012 campaign and has been completely disavowed today. The country has in many ways evolved in a leftward direction since Barack Obama’s first inauguration in January 2009.
But this metric tells us something important about how voters see themselves, because that’s what it asks them about, and voters in the aggregate see themselves as moderate but somewhat to the right of center. This is why successful Democratic Party politicians of the past like Obama and especially Bill Clinton have often provoked deep anger from elements of their base.