Winning Elections 101: Why Moderating Positions Loses Votes
Why Biden Shouldn't Move One Inch to the Right
By
David Gottfried
Nicholas Kristoff wrote in the March 13, 2024 issue of the NY Times that Biden can bolster his electoral prospects by becoming more stringent about immigration. Although I am anxious about excessive immigration, Kristoff is mistaken.
Apparently, Kristoff, and a slew of other amateur political sleuths educated by good-looking talking heads on television, believe that by moderating a permissive or progressive stance, and by inching closer to the GOP position, Biden will garner support from less liberal voters. It doesn’t work like that.
Many electoral contests prove that when a candidate moderates his positions, he loses support. Going moderate is seen as going Soft. The candidate who moderates his views appears to be expressing guilt or contrition for his former positions, and if he is a liberal trying to woo conservatives, conservative voters decide that they’ll vote for the candidate who was conservative all along.
For example, in the beginning of the 1980 presidential primaries, Ted Kennedy’s advisors said he ought to tone down his liberalism. He did, and he bombed in all the early primaries. However, he ditched that strategy by the time of the New York primary, and the NY Times reported, on the Saturday immediately before the NY primary, that Kennedy had returned to a position of “undiluted liberalism.” Kennedy then won NY 59 percent to 41 percent. Similarly, when Alf Landon ran for President in 1936, he appeared to ape FDR’s liberalism – and Alfie lost every state in the nation except Maine and Vermont. In 2004, George Bush ran a hard right campaign, and he won the state of Ohio even though unemployment was quite high in Ohio at that time. In 1988, Michael Dukakis was afraid to admit that he was a liberal, and the voters saw this as cowardice. And Dukakis won only 9 states plus the district of Columbia.
Finally, because most Democrats routinely talk about middle class issues, and are terrified of sounding too liberal, they almost never talk about the nitty gritty of working-class life (They are beginning to pay more attention to income, but they don’t discuss the concrete conflicts poor and working-class people encounter). For example, when they talk about Housing, they never talk about high rents (Biden’s State of the Union Address was a laudable exception) and other urban issues like Mass Transit, gentrification, unemployment and poverty. Beating the drum ala FDR and RFK can spell out the difference in key battle ground states with big cities: Michigan, Pennsylvania. Arizona and Georgia (Think Detroit, Philly, Pittsburgh, Phoenix and Atlanta.) But the days of glorious big city rallies for liberal Femocrats are long since gone.
Mathew, thanks for offering that quote from, I presuime, FDR.
The 1940 convention was highly atypical iin that FDR was challenged from within his own party by his vice president, John Nance Garner.
Garner had been FDR's VP from 33 to Jan or March of 41. Shortly before the convention, John Nance Ganner toyed with the idea of challenging FDR, for the Democratic Prez nomination, from the right. Garner was a retrograde, aristocratic, Dixiecrat whose positions were antithetical to those of the New Deal
At the 40 conventkion, Garner was replaced, as VEEP, by Henry Wallace.
People often forget that while he was president, FDR was constantly attacked and harrangued from shills for big business. Most of the newspapers of this country were dead set against him. Needless to say, he handled the attacks with ferocity when appropriate and with brilliant humor when a good joke could skewer his opposition.
I agree. In fact, his warning to the 1940 Democratic convention is salient today:
.......
"The Democratic Convention, as appears clear from the events of today, is divided on this fundamental issue. Until the Democratic Party through this convention makes overwhelmingly clear its stand in favor of social progress and liberalism, and shakes off all the shackles of control fastened upon it by the forces of conservatism, reaction, and appeasement, it will not continue its march of victory."