The Time that the New York Times made me so angry that I Finally had to Write Something

Mark Penn and Andrew Stein’s July 6th, 2017 article (“Back to the Center, Democrats”) was completely devoid of any facts, statistics, or analysis, and instead rested its arguments purely on bald assertions.  Perhaps this is because even the most cursory glance at the facts will not bear out Penn and Stein’s now completely discredited theories.  It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Penn and Stein would rehearse these outworn and empty phrases, since this is the type of advice taught to freshmen political science majors. 

In statistics, the normal (or Gaussian) distribution, more popularly called a “bell curve,” depicts the way that everything from dandelions to airline flights seem to arrange themselves.  Most things are average, and if you go away from this “mode” at the center, there will be fewer and fewer things, making a nice bell shape.  And in normal times, that seems to be how people align politically.  If you graph all of the people, grouped by their place on spectrum between the “left” and the “right,” there are usually a few outliers at the extreme right and the extreme left, a few more closer in, and most people are somewhere in the middle.





In normal times, the rational strategy for a politician (particularly after primary season) is to move toward the center.  More precisely, the strategy for a politician on the left is to move to the right, and for a politician on the right to move to the left – in fact, in both cases, it is advantageous to move past the center, as fast as you can, before your opponent gets there, so that when you finally confront each other, you will have “captured” most of the votes on your side.

There’s just one problem with the above strategy.  THESE ARE NOT NORMAL TIMES. 

The above analysis and strategy makes many assumptions, some of which were true back in the 90s, and indeed for much of the 20th century (though not all of it).  But none of them apply to the second decade of the 21st century, and it’s not clear that they will ever be true again.  Instead, we have a situation that looks more and more like an inverted bell curve:


This may seem confusing... unnatural... even a violation of fundamental natural laws.  But actually it is perfectly explicable. What is going on is that instead of one bell curve, we have two bell curves, which are quite quickly moving further and further apart from each other, and now the greatest danger for politicians lies in falling into the valley between them.

Here’s the part where I back up my assertions with facts, in a manner in which Mark Penn and Andrew Stein will be utterly incapable.

In 2014, the Pew Research Center performed a very sophisticated and thorough study of political attitudes in the American public (“Political Polarization in the American Public: How Increasing Ideological Uniformity and Partisan Antipathy Affect Politics, Compromise and Everyday Life”).  What they found was precisely what I have described: two bell curves, quickly moving away from each other.




Of course the median Democrat is to the left of the median Republican.  When you super-impose the top graphs on the bottom graphs, you will see an enormous chasm opening up between these two quickly diverging bell curves.  This is the long-term trend, and it is accelerating.  This study, I repeat, was done in 2014.  By all indications, American politics is far more divided now than it was then.

But in a way, all of this just confirms what statisticians have known for decades: there is no large independent center, that sits somewhere between the extremes of the two major parties. As long ago as 1992, a team of researchers led by Bruce E Keith and David Magleby at the University of Michigan wrote “The Myth of the Independent Voter,” which demonstrated in great statistical detail that independents, who make up more than a third of the country, are not really centrists – in fact, they nearly all align with one of the two major parties, but if anything, they tend to be more extreme than the leadership of either party – often, far more extreme.  In other words, they are past the tops of the bell-curves, far outside of the valley between them.

One can lament this fact.  One can wish for a polity that was less divided, hope for a populace that was more unified, dream of a people that would be more inclined to cooperation.  But all these are are wishes, hopes, and dreams.  A strategy that assumes that any of this is true is a strategy based on delusion. The facts remain, stubbornly, the facts.

The focus of any contemporary political strategy should be three things: voter turnout, voter turnout, and voter turnout.  The Democratic Party has dropped the ball by seeking to win over the mythical centrist voters. But the thing about the tiny minority of the country that truly has not made up its mind about which side it's on, right or left, is that those people don't vote.  It is a myth, for instance, that the same white voters who voted for Barack Obama now voted for Donald Trump. About the same numbers of white voters in Midwestern states voted for Trump as voted for Mitt Romney – in fact, slightly less. But the Obama voters simply didn't show up to the voting booths. And this is why all the pollsters, like Penn, got the election of 2016 so wrong.  In a poll, the pollster comes to the people. But in an election, the people have to go to the polls.  That means they have to be motivated to go.  And that means they have to see a strong difference between the candidates, and have some hope for one of them.  The further candidates move to the center, the less motivated the electorate will be.

The problem for Democrats with the election of 2016 (and some of the special elections afterwords) is that Republican candidates were moving to the top of their bell curve, while the Democrats move into the “dead zone” outside of theirs.  The press treats this as a rightward shift in the mood of the nation, but this is utterly false – in fact, on most issues, the vast majority of Americans is moving further and further to the left, if Democratic politicians could only figure out a strategy to represent that grassroots shift.

In a few short paragraphs, Penn and Stein have managed to distill the essence of the emptiness and incoherence of DNC strategy.  This idea that they will somehow convince moderate Republicans en masse to start voting for Democrats could only come from people who are so ensconced in the media bubble of giant metropolises like DC and NYC (essentially the only places where moderate Republicans are defecting from the GOP) that they have completely lost touch with reality for most of us in the rest of the country.

For decades, the centrists of the Democratic party have been telling the leftists that we don't have the numbers.  Now that we have the numbers, they dismiss us as populists.

Frequently we are told that we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, that we should not insist on purity in politics, that we cannot always get what we want, that politics is the art of the compromise, and for this reason we must abandon our narrow concerns for the sake of left unity.  All of this is exactly true.  And for that very reason, centrists like Penn and Stein will have to take their lumps, give up on their chimerical vision of a successful centrist politician, and learn to compromise with  - or better yet, join – the vast majority of their party, which is far, far to the left of them.  You (and I) may not agree with the far left – you may not even like the far left – but we had better start acting in their interests, if we want to have any hope of winning elections.  Because the problem with moving “back to the center” is that THERE ARE NO VOTES THERE.