An aggressive administration fires federal employees, changes geographical names and appoints a vaccine skeptic to high office. Opponents of the president challenge many of his initiatives in court. The executive branch defies court orders. The House minority leader stages a sit-in on the steps of the Capitol. A Republican senator deplores his party’s ties to Wall Street and business interests. Pro-Palestinian students take over buildings and pour red paint on revered campus monuments.
This is not a moderate moment in America.
But then again, maybe it is.
With a president whose strident social-media statements appear at all hours of the early morning, with a democratic socialist senator and a progressive House member conducting a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, and with the country’s campuses aflame with protests and recrimination, it sometimes seems as if the right and the left are moving further apart than ever, at an ever-quickening pace.
There is evidence that is exactly what’s happening, at least on Capitol Hill. But there is another dynamic at work, hidden beneath the surface of American politics, overshadowed by the passions and partisanship of the country’s leaders.
The torrid 21st century may actually be the high-water mark for those with no party identification and with moderate views.
That’s because, in recent elections, the party that won independent moderates won the presidential election. It also means that the Democrats cannot return to power unless they find a way to appeal to moderate voters
— which may be a difficult task when their most prominent figures today are Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, two members of Congress who essentially define the furthest extreme of conventional Democratic politics.
“Small numbers of voters have been deciding presidential elections in a small number of states,” said David Brady, a Stanford University political scientist who has been studying the effect of independents and moderates in American politics. “Candidates who win the vote of moderate independents win the election. Candidates who lose those voters lose the election.”
This effect is evident in the elections of Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
As the Democratic presidential nominee, Obama won independent moderates by 10 percentage points in 2008 and by 7 points four years later, according to The Economist/YouGov poll. In 2020, when Trump sought reelection, independent moderates went to Joe Biden by 8 percentage points, and he won the election.
When Democrats fail to take independent moderates, they lose. This happened in 2016, when Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton split the independent moderates, each with 43 percent of that group. It happened again in 2024, when Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris split independent moderates, each with 48 percent of those voters.
With between 35 percent and 45 percent of Democrats considering themselves moderates, the party’s congressional delegation is out of sync with the party at large. “In short,” said Douglas Rivers, who runs the Economist/YouGov poll, “if you win swing voters, you get elected.”
While Democrats struggle to win the support of politically moderate Americans, Trump has figured out the keys to the political kingdom for a Republican presidential candi Draw substantial numbers of voters from the white working class who used to identify as Democrats and add a growing number of minorities, a formula that gives Republicans sufficient support to absorb losses in suburban areas that recently have been leaning to the Democrats.
The importance of independent and Democratic moderates is not a new concept for Democrats. Winning their support has been elusive since the last quarter of the last century.
That is why the Democrats lost five of the six elections between 1968 (when Richard Nixon won the White House against Hubert Humphrey, who defined liberalism at the time despite his identification with the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam War policy) and 1988 (when George H.W. Bush prevailed in his race against Michael Dukakis, who bore the burden of being from Brookline, Massachusetts, perhaps the most liberal area of perhaps the most liberal state).
That prompted moderates within the party, led by Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, to form the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Aided by running in a three-way race at a time when white working-class voters still had strong identification with the Democrats, Clinton finally broke through and captured the White House in 1992.
“It’s always the case that there are three conservatives to every two liberals, so the Democrats have to win moderates if they are to win elections,” Alvin From, the founder of the DLC, said in an interview. “The lesson isn’t that complicated: You have to win beyond your base when your base is too small to win.”
These labels are imprecise and constantly shifting, but though Clinton, Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman often were characterized by Republicans as liberals, they were by some measure moderates in their own time — and surely are moderates, if not in some areas conservatives, by today’s standards. (It is bracing to remember that Sen. Joe Biden, whose policies the Republicans pilloried as too liberal for this era, was an original member of the DLC.)
The early notion of the DLC could easily be adapted and adopted by today’s Democrats: “to develop an agenda, grounded in Democratic Party principles, that could make us competitive again in the presidential elections.”
From believes that Democrats have to be open to new faces, the way they were in 1992 — and to take on the identity of insurgents rather than establishment figures while shoring up Democratic weaknesses on the economy and crime and steering clear of identity politics. “We restored a sense of national purpose to a party that had become dominated by constituency and narrow interest groups,” he said.
The Republicans don’t have to worry so much about moderates. While Dwight Eisenhower was a moderate, he was a special case because of his role in World War II. Otherwise, some of the more moderate GOP candidates — such as Wendell Willkie (1940), George H.W. Bush (1992) and Mitt Romney (2012) — failed to prevail.
Casting about for a middle ground has been a challenging chore for generations. A century and a half ago, Hugh Cecil counseled his House of Commons friend Winston Churchill: “A Middle Party … may be a very proper course when there is a Middle Party to join. Now there is none.” There isn’t one here, either.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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