Politicians, pundits, and pollsters are all trying to figure out what Democratic voters really want. With the extremely high stakes of the 2026 and 2028 elections before us — potentially including Supreme Court picks — divining the answer could set the course of the nation for the next decade, and longer.
But, as G. Elliott Morris writes at Strength in Numbers, the precise problem may just be that voters do not know what they want — or, to be more exact, what they say and what they mean can be very different. And that makes political strategy — and policy — nearly impossible to get correct.
Morris points to a recent New York Times poll that found a plurality of potential Democratic primary voters (47 percent) want the Democratic Party to move toward the center. But that very same poll of the same respondents also found that nearly half (49 percent) have a favorable opinion of socialism. And, to make matters even more difficult, a majority (55 percent) of those same voters say the party is neither too far to the left nor to the right.
“So what we’ve got here,” Morris writes, “is a Democratic electorate that is evidently pro-moderate, pro-socialist, and favors the party’s ideological status quo.”
Looking at a different poll, from May, Morris found that what all voters — not just Democrats — want are “middle-class tax cuts, higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and a crackdown on corporate price-gouging.”
“Either the electorate is hopelessly confused,” he continues, “or the ‘move left or center’ question isn’t measuring what pundits think it measures — or both.”
Morris digs deeper.
“Voters aren’t strategists, and asking them whether the party should move to the center doesn’t measure the electoral payoff of moving to the center — it measures whether they’ve absorbed, and agree with, the conventional wisdom that says moving to the center is how parties win,” he writes. “Those are different things.”
Morris goes one step further: “it’s not clear Americans have a good understanding of ideology anyway — or, at the very least, that that understanding translates in any way to policy and other outcomes.”
He notes that in the Times poll, nearly one-third of Democratic voters couldn’t explain what they thought about socialism —which means that this finding “indicates a low level of engagement with these subjects among the general public.”
Finally, Morris really gets to the heart of the matter.
He explains that he showed in April that only 8 percent of “self-described ‘moderates’ actually want moderation when you let them describe their politics in their own words.”
Image via Shutterstock