America Still Has a Political Center, and It’s the Key to Winning

American politics today can seem to be dominated by extremes. President Trump is carrying out far-right policies, while some of the country’s highest-profile Democrats identify as democratic socialists. Moderation sometimes feels outdated.

It is not. Candidates closer to the political center, from both parties, continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left. This pattern may be the strongest one in electoral politics today, but it is one that many partisans try to obscure and many voters do not fully grasp.

The evidence is vast. Republicans have frittered away winnable races in Alabama, New Hampshire and elsewhere over the past decade by nominating extremist candidates, while Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate Republican, is the only sitting senator who represents a state that reliably votes the other way in presidential elections. On the Democratic side, there are no progressives in the mold of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders who represent a swing district or state. Instead, the Democrats who win tough races work hard to signal to voters that they are less progressive than their party.

One way to see the pattern is to examine the 17 Democrats — 13 in the House, four in the Senate — who last year won in places that Mr. Trump also won. Moderation dominated their campaign messages. Ruben Gallego of Arizona mocked the term “Latinx” and was hawkish on immigration. Representative Vicente Gonzalez of Texas and Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada criticized other Democrats’ tolerance of illegal immigration. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Representative Pat Ryan of New York emphasized public safety and their national security backgrounds. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin bragged about taking on federal bureaucrats who had imposed needless regulation. Representative Jared Golden of Maine spoke of “opening up oil and gas production to lower fuel costs.” No progressive won a race as difficult as any of these.

Even Mr. Trump highlights the pattern. Extreme as he is in many ways, he moved the Republican Party toward the center on several key issues. He won the party’s nomination and the general election in 2016 partly by rejecting unpopular conservative positions on Social Security, Medicare and global trade. Last year he broke with prominent Republicans and said he would veto a national abortion ban. He also focused his 2024 campaign on areas in which the Democratic Party had moved left over the previous decade and was out of step with public opinion, such as immigration, transgender issues and parts of education policy. Voters noticed. Polls in 2024 showed that most voters considered their policy views to be closer to Mr. Trump’s than to Kamala Harris’s.

Mr. Trump’s victory over Ms. Harris was telling in another way. The moderation that has worked best in recent years is not a sober, 20th-century centrism that promises to protect the status quo. It is more combative and populist. It tends to be left of center on economics and right of center on social issues (with abortion being an exception). “Angry centrism is a very potent way to run,” said Lakshya Jain, a founder of Split Ticket, a political data firm. Rather than locating itself midway between the two parties, this new centrism promises sweeping change while criticizing the two parties as out of touch.

As Representative Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Ohio, said in a campaign ad last year, “America has gotten off course.” She cited “the far left ignoring millions illegally crossing the border and trying to defund the police” and “the far right taking away women’s rights and protecting greedy corporations at every turn.” Although Mr. Trump won her district by seven percentage points, voters re-elected her.

Apart from individual issues, many voters understand the importance of political independence for its own sake. A diverse, pluralistic nation depends on mutual understanding and regular compromise. Our political system works best when it includes politicians who are not beholden to either side’s orthodoxy and instead build coalitions to tackle major challenges. It is no coincidence that as the number of heterodox, compromise-oriented Democrats and Republicans has declined in Washington, Congress has become less functional.

These lessons are especially urgent for Democrats. Despite Mr. Trump’s rhetorical nods to the center, he is governing as a radical who rejects longstanding governing constraints and uses the power of the presidency to enrich his family, protect his allies and punish people he dislikes. He threatens American democracy, and congressional Republicans have been complicit. The Democratic Party, as a result, has become the only party of the country’s two major ones that respects basic republican traditions like the sanctity of elections and the constitutional system of checks and balances.

Yet many Americans see the Democratic Party as too liberal, too judgmental and too focused on cultural issues to be credible, and voters are moving away from it. “Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot,” The Times reported this summer. Perhaps most worrisome for Democrats, younger voters, nonwhite Americans and immigrants, all growing parts of the electorate, have shifted from the party.

Many progressives have tried to wish away these warning signs and insist that they can win by quietly retaining all their unpopular positions and emphasizing economic issues. But they cannot point to a single member of Congress or governor from swing districts or states who has pursued this strategy and won. Their favorite examples are all from deep blue parts of the country. The failure of the motivate-the-base approach is hiding in plain sight.

Georgia and Wisconsin have offered recent case studies. In Georgia, Raphael Warnock and Stacey Abrams, both Democrats, ran for statewide offices in 2022, making what NBC News called “two markedly different pitches to voters.” She ran a “bold progressive” campaign meant to “turbocharge progressive turnout,” while he put “a greater emphasis on courting the center” by emphasizing his independence and bipartisanship. He won his Senate race. She lost her race for governor, as she did four years earlier. Likewise, in Wisconsin, Mandela Barnes, a progressive Democrat with a history of supporting cuts to immigration enforcement and police funding, lost his 2022 Senate race, while Ms. Baldwin and Gov. Tony Evers have won by running to the middle.

In an earlier era, Democrats’ denialism might not have been cause for national alarm. They could lose a few more elections and eventually find a path back to power, as they did after losing five of six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988. Government policy would be more conservative in the meantime, but American democracy would not be at risk.

The situation is different now. Anybody who views Mr. Trump as a threat to American values and the national interest, as this editorial board does, should be rooting for an opposition that can defeat him and his MAGA allies. Indeed, moving to the center would enable Democrats to confront him more aggressively and effectively because voters would see them as credible. To take one issue, most voters disapprove of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies — and nonetheless trust his party on the issue more than they trust Democrats. A more moderate Democratic Party would be better positioned to combat his outrageous violations of civil liberties.

The refusal of many Democrats to grapple with their party’s weakness is a political gift to Mr. Trump, and it should worry anybody who rejects his vision for the country.

We know that some readers will be skeptical of this argument. After all, isn’t Mr. Sanders turning out big crowds for his Fighting Oligarchy speaking tour? Hasn’t Ms. Ocasio-Cortez built a national following? Isn’t Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, favored to become the next mayor of New York City?

All these things are true, partly because millions of Americans are inspired by a bold progressive message. But they account for a small share of the country — disproportionately college-educated and white, according to the Pew Research Center — and are concentrated in safely Democratic areas like New York and California. They are not nearly numerous enough to flip the places required to win the presidency and Congress.

To understand what does win, we analyzed every House election last year. We defined House candidates as moderate, progressive or right wing, based on the groups that supported their campaigns. Candidates who received money from centrist groups like the Blue Dog PAC counted as moderates, for instance, and ones who received money from left-wing PACs like Justice Democrats counted as progressives.

Our main finding was that moderates in both parties fared better, on average, than candidates farther from the center:

This pattern helps explain the chart at the beginning of this editorial, showing that the only 16 House candidates to win in districts that their party’s presidential candidate lost were moderates.

We also analyzed the roughly 100 Senate elections of the past six years, which have produced every current U.S. senator, and found:

Senate candidates running on centrist messages often overperformed their party’s presidential nominees. This group includes the four Democrats who won states that Mr. Trump also won last year: Ms. Baldwin, Mr. Gallego, Ms. Rosen and Ms. Slotkin. It also includes Republicans like Ms. Collins, John Curtis in Utah and Larry Hogan, who lost a Senate election in Maryland but ran far ahead of other Republicans on the ballot.

The Senate’s two best-known progressives, Mr. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, received a smaller share of the vote in their states last year than Ms. Harris did. Mr. Sanders’s arc is instructive. Earlier in his career — when he took just as feisty a stance on the economy but spoke more about his concerns about immigration and support of hunting — he received more votes than the Democratic candidates at the top of the ticket. He no longer does. His story is a microcosm. Heterodox Democrats with some high-profile moderate positions can overperform without moving to the center on every issue.

Some of the strongest recent Senate candidates reject both parties’ labels. They are independents who avoid both Trumpist extremism and elite cultural progressivism. Senator Angus King of Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats, is one of them. He beat his Republican opponent last year by much more than Ms. Harris beat Mr. Trump in the state. Dan Osborn of Nebraska and Evan McMullin of Utah, two other independents, lost their recent Senate campaigns but ran far ahead of Democrats on the ticket. Mr. Osborn, a populist who has praised Mr. Trump’s border wall, resembles the old version of Mr. Sanders.

The researchers making that claim rely on data about candidate ideology that can have little connection to voter perceptions. It includes academic measures that encompass thousands of obscure congressional votes and campaign donations. The data ends up being so messy as to produce bizarre results. One measure rates Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, two progressive heroes, as more centrist than the consciously moderate Mr. Warnock. Another index judges Ms. Ocasio-Cortez to be less progressive than Representative Ritchie Torres, whose positions on immigration and Israel anger the left. That these measures suggest ideology is unimportant says more about them than about political reality.

The true picture is that moderate candidates fare a few percentage points better, on average, than otherwise similar candidates. The gap grows when comparing moderates with progressive Democrats or right-wing Republicans. In today’s divided America, even a few percentage points can be the difference between victory and defeat.

That said, individual candidates can do only so much to distance themselves from their party’s image. Democrats are in such a weak position today — with Republicans holding the White House, the Senate, the House, most governorships and most state legislatures — largely because of the unpopularity of their brand. Retaking control of the Senate seems particularly daunting, with Democrats needing victories in states where they are often uncompetitive today, like Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. After 2030, the Electoral College may also become harder to win because the population has shifted to purple and red states.

These problems underscore the biggest potential benefit of moderation for Democrats. Polls show that most voters see the Democratic Party as too left wing and too focused on niche issues. Were that to change, the party could start winning in many more places.

Recent history demonstrates that a party can change its image. These transformations typically happen through presidential campaigns. The most successful presidential candidates of the past few decades made concerted efforts to counter what voters saw as their party’s ideological excesses and lifted the entire party in the process.

Bill Clinton was known for triangulation, including through his notorious criticism of the singer Sister Souljah, and he ended the Democrats’ 1980s losing streak. George W. Bush promised “compassionate conservatism.” Joe Biden in his 2020 campaign asked, “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?”

Barack Obama might have spent more time signaling his moderation than any other recent president. He spoke of worshiping an awesome God, criticized companies for undercutting wages by hiring “illegal workers,” said he was open to restrictions on “late-term abortions,” angered teachers’ unions by favoring accountability measures, initially opposed same-sex marriage, argued that his daughters should not benefit from affirmative action, criticized government waste and was hawkish on many military matters. He is also the only Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a majority of the popular vote more than once. The party has moved significantly to the left since Mr. Obama left office.

Crucially, winning candidates find salient ways to signal to voters that they are not captive to their party’s dogma. They buck it and withstand criticism from their own side — criticism that then conveniently underscores their independence in voters’ minds. Mr. Trump’s rise was possible because he recognized that most voters did not want Social Security cuts or mass immigration (two policies that many corporate Republicans favor), let alone a national abortion ban. The extremism of his second term can shroud the savvy of his politics.

That extremism offers an opportunity to the Democratic Party. Mr. Trump is governing in ways that put the Republican Party out of step with public opinion on taxes, health insurance, abortion, immigration, executive power and more. If Democrats were willing to be less ideological — less beholden to views that many liberal activists, intellectuals and donors genuinely hold but that most Americans do not — they would have the opportunity to build the country’s next governing majority.

Moderates are hardly blameless here. They have too often promoted a bland technocratic centrism and backed uninspiring candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris. Political moderation does not need to be boring. Mr. Obama, Mr. Clinton and John F. Kennedy — moderates, all — inspired voters with visions for the country that felt fresh and nonideological. They artfully used emerging forms of media. They won over people who were not political junkies. They understood that moderation was both necessary and far short of sufficient.

Ultimately, moderation is about respect. Politicians do not need to heed every bit of public opinion. They can sometimes attempt to forge a new consensus. But they cannot dismiss views held by most Americans as uninformed and insist that one day the ignorant masses will come around. When politicians try that, voters usually choose an alternative, even a destructive one. Today that destructive alternative has arrived. The antidote is a creative, re-energized political center.