Micro and Macro Moderates: Can Strategies for Winning at the District Level be Scaled Nationally?

The debate roiling the election world skips over a key question.

If you have spent any time reading about elections on the internet, you have probably seen Democrats tearing themselves apart over a simple question: do moderate candidates perform better than more extreme ones? In the wake of the Democratic Party’s defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, the party lacks a clear leader or direction. This debate on how to move forward is deeper than an academic discussion— especially after Tuesday’s elections gave each side of the debate something to point to.

Progressives hope to grab the party mantle and move it to the left, arguing that more economically populist stances would help the party win. Now, they’re pointing to Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York as evidence of left-wing policies winning elections. Moderates, in contrast, are adamant that the Democratic Party’s main problem is that it is already too left-wing for voters, and must move to the center if it wants to win in 2026 and 2028. Centrist blowouts in Virginia and New Jersey bolster their case.

Moderates usually point to data saying that, controlling for all else, centrists perform better. For example, the “WAR” (Wins Above Replacement) scores from the website SplitTicket shows that moderates of both parties overperform more extreme candidates. The New York Times, using a similar methodology, found the same. On top of that, moderates point to now-forgotten politicians like Collin Peterson, John Barrow, and Heidi Heitkamp who, despite eventually losing, often outran the national ticket by double digits. They also point to the best-performing Republicans like Phil Scott and Brian Fitzpatrick as evidence that voters prefer moderates, no matter the party.

Progressives, for their part, dispute that policy moderation matters much, arguing that Democrats lose because they appear as unprincipled, bland, corporate centrists who fail to offer voters anything compelling or different. In this view, Democrats must return to economic populism, even if it’s more nominally “extreme” in order to win. Progressives also point out that all the “overperforming” moderates still lost, despite their best efforts. In the Progressive narrative, moderate overperformance is, at best, a very small effect, and at worst, a statistical illusion caused by other variables.

This debate has spilled over from just discussing congressional or senate races to discussing national elections as well. In the view of moderates, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris because he was seen as more moderate. If the party wants to win, it needs to moderate at the national level, not just run a few centrists in a few swing seats.

But everyone in this debate is skipping an obvious issue: even if moderate congressional candidates perform better, can those strategies be scaled up to help a party win nationally? All of the analysis of congressional races assumes it can; and that makes sense, given that the whole debate really seems to be a proxy fight over who gets to set the national Democratic brand going into 2028.

Contrary to what both sides of the debate assume, there’s good reason to think that the moderation strategies that help candidates at the congressional (micro) level, can’t just be copied at the national (macro) level.

For starters, congressional candidates are “moderate” next to a national backdrop that they have little control over. A moderate might tout how much they break with their party, but no individual member sets the whole party’s priorities, bills, and messaging. This means that the definition of what makes a “moderate” changes over time. In contrast, national parties and their presidential candidates have much more say in setting that national backdrop.

The fact that what makes a candidate “moderate” over time changes over time is easy to show. A moderate Republican in 2006 may have broken with the party on the Iraq War; a Republican in 1999 could do no such thing, because the Bush Administration didn’t exist and hadn’t invaded Iraq yet. Two different politicians could both be seen as moderates, but at different points in time, and in different places, based entirely on what issues are salient and how the national party’s coalition has changed. Nationally, parties think about how to make new issues salient and change their voter coalition. While individual candidates can always moderate against a national baseline, the national party can’t.

Of course, moderates would argue that there is a kind of platonic national backdrop that parties and presidential candidates can moderate against—public opinion. But even if that’s true, this probably doesn’t work the same way as moderating for an individual candidate. For one, parties and the political movements associated with them can change and mold public opinion in a way individual congressional candidates cannot. A moderate Republican in 2012 might express support for gay marriage; a moderate Republican in 1992 would not. In between those twenty years, activists and the Democratic Party changed public opinion on the issue. Parties also often leverage and campaign on previously underdiscussed issues. In contrast, for individual candidates, their ability to change public opinion or raise new issues is nonexistent. Parties can win voters at the national level in more ways than just breaking with the party orthodoxy.

Second, national politicians have more non-policy ways to appeal to voters. Appearing likeable, earnest, or just having “good vibes” can make a positive impression on voters. And that positive impression, like in social relationships, may make voters minimize the importance of a candidate’s policy views or engender loyalty. This is especially true in presidential races, where popular candidates often generate deeply loyal bases of voters who previously supported the other party. But congressional candidates rarely get enough media exposure to pull off this trick. Voters hear very little about them, often only seeing a few ads or speaking to friends and family. They simply do not see enough of most candidates to form solid opinions of them outside of whether they seem moderate in comparison to the national party.

Lastly, congressional candidates need to moderate on different issues depending on the exact makeup and location of their district. Some districts will call for moderation on guns, some on economics, and some on immigration. Moderation at a national level requires parties to assess tradeoffs, almost always moderating on some issues but not others. But for individual candidates, there may not be tradeoffs to breaking from the party on a specific issue or set of issues important to voters in their district.

The debate over how to win is not going to end anytime soon. When Democrats inevitably come back to power, then the GOP will engage in the same debate about what kind of candidates can bring the party back. As of now, the fight is over what data to look at, and whether that data really shows what candidates perform best. Maybe participants should refocus, and ask whether it makes sense to try to apply that data to national campaigns at all.