http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/opinion/campaign-stops/the-rise-of-presidential-extemists.html 2016-09-12 14:23:55 The Rise of Presidential Extremists Candidates take extreme stands because there is little electoral consequence to doing so. === Political scientists But contemporary American political parties seem not to have gotten the message. On major issues, their positions routinely diverge from the center of public opinion, with Democrats well to the left (for example, see Many analysts argue that candidates — usually meaning their political opponents — take “extreme” positions because they must cater to the views of the core partisans who provide them with primary votes, enthusiasm and money. “Modern Republican politicians can’t be serious,” Yet the striking fact is that presidential candidates are frequently even more extreme than their own party’s core supporters, who have also become more extreme in recent decades. Using survey data from the authoritative Across all five issues, the average distance between Democratic and Republican core partisans increased by almost one-third between 1980 and 2012, from 26 points to 34 points on a 100-point scale. On average, the Democratic base moved 1.5 points further to the left of swing voters, while the Republican base moved 6.5 points further to the right. While candidates’ positions do not seem very responsive to shifts in the positions of swing voters, they are sometimes not all that responsive to shifts in the positions of their core supporters, either. Blaming the parties’ bases for political polarization misses most of the story. A more compelling explanation is that candidates take extreme stands because they can — the electoral incentive to moderate their positions is too weak to outweigh their own ideological convictions. The problem with the theory predicting that candidates will be compelled to adopt centrist positions to get elected is that it assumes centrist voters will reliably choose the candidate whose policy positions are closest to their own. But centrist voters mostly have The authors of a recent Goldwater in 1964 and McGovern in 1972 probably did a few percentage points worse than they would have if they had been more moderate, but they lost mainly because they were challenging incumbents who presided over election-year economic booms. In contrast, Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Barack Obama in 2008 had the good fortune to run in years when economic recessions undermined the political appeal of their more moderate opponents, and they both won easily. In this year’s race, Mrs. Clinton is leading in the polls despite her “hard-core liberal” It would be hard to argue that a candidate’s temperament and experience should be irrelevant to voters. But it is also worth asking whether policy “extremism” is such a bad thing, anyway. People who are quick to condemn the extremism of their political opponents often see virtue in their own party’s deviations from centrist opinion. The single largest difference in positions between either party’s presidential candidates and swing voters over the past three decades has been on the issue of racial policy. On average, Republican candidates have been seen as just six points to the right of the political center on the question of government assistance to African-Americans. Democratic candidates have been 26 points to the left. This gulf between Democratic candidates and swing voters may reflect principled adherence to a progressive vision of racial justice, or pragmatic catering to the interests of a key group in the Democratic electoral coalition, or — most likely — some combination of both. The gulf widened in the last two election cycles, but not because Barack Obama was seen as more liberal than his predecessors on this issue. Rather, the political center had itself shifted even further to the right than it had been in the 1980s and ’90s. Democrats may be tempted to say that that is a political center they want no part of. Perhaps they would add — with or without some awareness of But that is just the sort of thinking, repeated on issue after issue on both sides of the political spectrum, that accounts for why our politics often seem so polarized.