Busting the Myths Surrounding Moderate, Independent, and Undecided Voters
First, and most importantly, those three kinds of voters are not the same.
When we talk about politics and elections in this country, a premium has developed around the idea of “moderate” or “centrist” voters — those who don’t run to extremes, but who stick to the middle and can be up for grabs for candidates of either party.
But what if that whole premise is wrong? What if our beliefs about what motivates them as a single voting bloc are based on misconceptions about who those voters are?
“The reality is that there are a lot of voters who identify as moderate, that’s certainly true. But when you ask those voters about what they believe, they are actually all over the political map,” Lee Drutman, senior fellow in the political reform program at New America.
Drutman recently wrote a piece for FiveThirtyEight titled, “The Moderate Middle Is A Myth.”
“There’s no single policy position that’s going to win those voters,” he continues on Detroit Today with Stephen Henderson.
