The result is that voters who hold gentle opinions that are all on the left or the right end up looking a lot more extreme than voters who hold intense opinions that fall all over the political spectrum. These people look like moderates but they're actually quite extreme." You'll often see really draconian measures towards gays and lesbians get 16 to 20 percent support. "A lot of people say we should deport all undocumented immigrants immediately with no due process. "A lot of people say we should have a universal health-care system run by the state like the British," Broockman said in July 2014. "These people look like moderates but they're actually quite extreme"īut when you drill down into those individual answers you find a lot of opinions that are well out of the political mainstream. People who have a mix of answers on the left and the right average out to the middle - and so they're labeled as moderate. The answers will then be coded as to whether they're left or right.
The way it works is that a pollster will ask people for their position on a wide range of issues: marijuana legalization, the war in Iraq, universal health care, gay marriage, taxes, climate change, and so on. What happens, explains David Broockman, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, is that surveys mistake people with diverse political opinions for people with moderate political opinions. The statistical mistake behind the myth of the moderates
When you dig into their policy positions, the people who show up as moderates in polls are actually pretty damn extreme - and efforts to empower them may, accidentally, lead to the rise of more extreme candidates. The only problem is moderates are largely a statistical myth. The problem with Washington is that her pleas so often go unheard. She yearns for politicians who get along, who govern reasonably and incrementally, who steer a course between the extremes of the left and the right. Unlike the ideologues and partisans destroying politics, the moderate is free of cant and independent of party. There is no creature more revered in American politics than the moderate voter.
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