The New York Times Argues “Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win.” But the Data Shows the Strategy Is Tapped Out.

Democrats already run moderates in nearly every swing district. It's not enough. A data-driven response to the case for centrism as a core electoral strategy.

Today, The New York Times Editorial Board published a piece titled, “The Partisans Are Wrong: Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win.” It’s a powerful articulation of a view held by many in politics: that moderation is the most reliable path to victory.

The piece touched directly on a lengthy and thoughtful exchange I had with David Leonhardt of The Times over the past few weeks. I want to start by saying how much I appreciated that exchange. It was a rigorous, good-faith, and clarifying debate that forced both of us to sharpen our arguments. That kind of engagement is rare and valuable.

The final editorial makes a clear case, and on several points during our conversation, David and I found common ground. We agree that running moderates in the most difficult swing districts is a sound tactic. We agree that economic populism is a powerful message and that the Democratic party is harmed by its perception as a party of “overeducated professionals.”

But for those who have followed my work, it won’t be a surprise that I believe the editorial’s central conclusion is based on an incomplete reading of the evidence. Our conversation included several key data points and concepts that didn’t make it into the final piece. My goal here isn’t to rebut the editorial, but to share some of that missing context.

Three key points: First, when we measure how voters actually perceive candidates, moderation shows no significant advantage. Second, even using the editorial’s own data, Democrats would have gained zero additional seats by running more moderates in competitive seats. Third, of 22 Democratic incumbents who lost tough races since 2016, only one was progressive. The evidence suggests the gains from moderation have already been exhausted.

The Data We Didn’t See

The empirical core of the editorial is an analysis showing that moderate candidates, as defined by their PAC endorsements, outperformed their presidential ticket. But is that the right way to measure the effect of moderation?

A better approach is to use measures of ideology that are more comprehensive or are directly tied to voter perceptions, and then see how candidates with different ideologies perform. For this analysis, we can use a straightforward metric: how much better or worse does a congressional candidate do compared to their party’s presidential nominee in the same district?

The result is telling. When using either the composite measure or, more importantly, the voter perception scores from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), the electoral benefit of a major ideological shift to the center is either small or statistically insignificant. The advantage provided by simply being an incumbent, by contrast, is a reliable 2-3 percentage points. In a recent research note with Jacob Grumbach that examines this question more rigorously, we find no clear electoral advantage for ideological moderation.

I was particularly disappointed not to see the CES data included in the editorial, as it measures exactly the concept—how voters perceive candidates—the piece sought to gauge. Whatever the reason for its exclusion, this data is crucial because it shows that being perceived as moderate by voters does not increase vote shares. It also challenges the claim that no progressives have won tough seats. That’s only true if you don’t count candidates like Tammy Baldwin, whom the editorial celebrates as a successful moderate but whom Wisconsin voters actually perceive as progressive. She won despite, not because of, how voters see her ideology. It fundamentally undermines the claim that only moderates win these districts.

Why Better Measures Matter

The NYT editorial is skeptical of “academic” measures of ideology, characterizing them as “messy” and producing “bizarre results.” To make this point, the article highlights cherry-picked examples where individual measures seem to miscategorize well-known politicians.

This critique, while overstated, is precisely why my recent research has focused on creating a composite measure of ideology. I solve the “noisiness” problem by combining information from over a dozen different sources—votes records, campaign donations, website text, voter assessments, and more. Importantly, none of the “bizarre” examples the editorial cites are present in the composite measure because it averages out the quirks of any single data source. It is a more robust and reliable tool and it shouldn’t be so readily dismissed.

How Many Seats Would Democrats Have Gained if They Ran Moderates in Every District?

But even if we set aside the more sophisticated measures and use the single PAC-based metric from the editorial, the case for a moderation-centric strategy falls apart. In our exchange, I ran a regression on the measures used in the editorial. It showed that being a “moderate” Democrat was associated with a modest +1.4 percentage point advantage in competitive districts, an effect that was borderline statistically insignificant.

Does this small advantage support making moderation the centerpiece of a party’s strategy? I ran a simulation to find out. If every progressive candidate on the list had been replaced by a moderate in 2024, the expected net change in Democratic seats would have been zero. The gains from this strategy, it seems, have already been tapped out.

What the Full “Scoreboard” Shows

Finally, the raw data on who wins and loses tells a story that directly challenges the editorial’s narrative. Examining Democratic performance in competitive House districts from 2016 to 2024 reveals two key facts:

1. Democrats are already running moderates in most swing districts.

2. In those same districts, progressive incumbents had higher win rates (93.3%) than their moderate counterparts (83.6%).

Looking at who lost is even more telling. The graveyard of defeated Democratic incumbents is full of moderates, not progressives—Brad Ashford, Ben McAdams, Tom O’Halleran, Susan Wild, and Max Rose, among them. Of the 22 Democratic incumbents who lost their seats between 2016 and 2024, 21 were moderates.

Perhaps most tellingly, the piece never grapples with institutional gatekeeping. The absence of progressive winners in swing districts may tell us more about who gets to run than who can win. Party committees, donors, and consultants have already decided that progressives shouldn’t compete in swing districts. But when progressive incumbents do compete in tough districts, they actually show higher success rates with their moderate counterparts.

What Is This Debate Really About?

A debate over a 1.4-point effect may seem academic. But it points to a fundamental disagreement over political strategy.

The view in the editorial is that Democrats must accept the political battlefield as it is and find messengers who can best navigate that terrain. It’s a strategy of accommodation—one that asks how to win within the constraints of a system many voters believe is fundamentally rigged.

My reading of the evidence points to a different conclusion. When the electoral gains from moderation have already been exhausted—when Democrats are already running moderates in nearly every competitive district and still losing—the task isn’t to moderate harder. It’s to give voters a reason to believe politics can deliver real change.

This requires a vision that does more than win on the margins. It requires a substantive, mobilizing agenda. I’ve proposed reframing the central conflict as Clean vs. Corrupt, an anti-corruption platform that speaks to a deep and powerful frustration among voters. A recent poll found that more Americans are ‘very worried’ about government corruption than about the cost of living or the economy.

Ultimately, this isn’t just a disagreement over data. It’s a disagreement over how tolerable the current political reality is—and how bold our strategy must be to change it. Winning the next election will be about whether Democrats will offer a vision that matches the scale of voters’ frustration with a system they increasingly see as corrupt and unresponsive. This requires a vision that does more than win on the margins with a strategy that is not clearly achieving even that.