The prevailing wisdom among centrist Democrats is that former Wayne County Health Director Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan on Tuesday spells disaster for the party’s chances of winning the seat — and jeopardizes its odds of clinching a majority in the senate. El-Sayed’s boldly progressive positions, according to this view, will alienate the electorate of a purple state whose statewide outcomes are determined by moderate swing voters.
But a recent study by two political scientists indicates that this view is wrong — and that even in the Rust Belt a left-wing candidate like El-Sayed is not doomed by virtue of supporting Medicare for All and cutting off military aid to Israel. A big reason for that is because of the way President Donald Trump has scrambled our politics and transformed the way Americans think of the left-right political spectrum.
Plunging trust in institutions and the collapse of the neoliberal consensus have made the banner of “anti-establishment” and “populist” positioning more salient than conventional ideology.
A lot of political scientific literature supports the idea that from the late 20th century through the mid-2000s, there were clear rewards for candidates in federal elections to take moderate positions and penalties for taking extreme ones. But there’s evidence indicating that during the 2010s — around the time of Trump’s rise and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ insurgency in the Democratic primaries — that dynamic began to change. Stanford University professor Adam Bonica and University of California professor Jacob Grumbach recently released a working paper — currently under peer review at a journal — that analyzes congressional elections from 2016 to 2024, and it found something remarkable: the penalty for extremism had vanished.
Bonica and Grumbach’s paper used a number of statistical models and a complex composite of candidate ideology to study millions of registered voters and evaluate how moderate candidates fared compared to more left-wing and right-wing candidates in congressional elections in the Trump era. What they found was “on average, candidates do not stand to gain by moderating — nor by moving to the extremes.” That applies to candidates on both the left and the right.
What happened? Our political environment changed.
To name a few plausible explanations: An increase in political polarization means that people vote for parties more than they vote for candidates in general elections — which renders intraparty debates less significant. A more partisan media environment has made centrism a less valuable political asset. And plunging trust in institutions and the collapse of the neoliberal consensus have made the banner of “anti-establishment” and “populist” positioning more salient than conventional ideology, as well as changed what constitutes ideological extremism.
Moderate Democrats often hold paranoid attitudes toward the rise of a progressive and democratic socialist wing of the Democratic Party, viewing it as a death knell for their appeal to voters outside of deep-blue areas.
But the counter-example to the idea that centrism is the only way to win battlegrounds has rocked their world for a decade: Trump has won two elections — the second by a larger margin than the first — while taking once-politically lethal positions on trade, foreign policy, democracy and flouting all kinds of norms regarding public decency and corruption. A large part of the way he’s been able to do that is because the public’s sense that what may be needed to solve our county’s problems lies outside the Beltway consensus. For many of these voters, the moderates are the problem.
The Bonica and Grumbach working paper does not mean that being very left-wing or right-wing is a good thing for winning any given election. It does not rule out the possibility that certain modes of ideological maximalism could turn off voters, nor should it give license to candidates to ignore how their specific electorate tends to look at the world. Consider, for example, how Sanders is a fiery democratic socialist but has often taken more moderate positions on gun control and immigration while representing a particularly racially homogeneous and rural state. And, of course, election outcomes are still shaped by lots of nonideological factors as well, including fundraising, candidate quality and charisma.
In what might be a perfect distillation of the study’s findings, a recent New York Times poll analysis found that polling, which attempted to gauge El-Sayed’s electability, doesn’t provide any definitive answers. In some surveys measuring hypothetical matchups, El-Sayed appeared stronger than the establishment Democrat he defeated in the primary (Rep. Haley Stevens) against the Republican nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers, while in others, El-Sayed was weaker than Stevens. And in some polls El-Sayed is ahead of Rogers in general election matchups, while in others, he’s behind. All we know now is it’s going to be a competitive, high-stakes race, and there’s no reason to think El-Sayed is doomed simply because he’s a progressive.
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