The gap between how campaigns talk about voters and how voters actually think is wide. Political scientists have spent decades trying to close it, and the picture that emerges is uncomfortable for strategists on both sides. The central finding is simple: voters do not think in left and right. Most people do not carry a coherent ideology in their heads, and they do not shop for candidates the way they shop for groceries. This is where the Strategist’s Fallacy comes in. G. Elliott Morris named that fallacy in October 2025: the belief that voters hold positions and match them to candidates like an entree off a menu. The research suggests that is mostly wrong.
The classic finding comes from Philip Converse, who found about one voter in nine reasons ideologically. Christopher Kinder and David Kalmoe later found that share has barely moved over decades. Morris puts the current figure at 10 to 15 percent. That means roughly one in eight voters thinks in terms of a consistent left-right framework. The rest rely on something else: party identity, social groups, feelings about the economy, or simple habit. This is not an insult to voters. It is just how human cognition works. Most people do not have the time or inclination to build a policy architecture from first principles. They use shortcuts.
That leads to the question of swing voters versus base voters. The base—the most partisan, most ideologically consistent slice—is small but loud. They donate, volunteer, and vote reliably. Campaigns obsess over them because they are easy to reach and easy to activate. But the research on persuasion is sobering. Across 49 field experiments, Joshua Kalla and David Broockman’s best estimate of campaign persuasion in a general election is zero. That is not a typo. Ads, canvassing, phone calls, mailers—none of it moves the needle in a general election. What moves voters is not persuasion but salience: reminding the election-year grade base to show up, not convincing the middle to switch sides.
So who are the swing voters? They are not moderates in the sense of holding carefully balanced positions between progressives and conservatives. They are more accurately called persuadable voters, but even that is misleading. They are less ideological and more volatile. They pay attention late, they vote on short-term conditions, and they often decide on a single factor: the economy, a scandal, or a feeling of safety. They are not weighing a menu. They are reacting to the weather.
This is why the moderation debate misses the point. The argument over whether Democrats should run as moderates versus progressives assumes that voters reward ideological positioning. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Broockman and Skovron found legislators in both parties overestimate how conservative their constituents are. That distortion comes from listening to the loudest voices—the base—rather than the median voter. The median voter is not a moderate in the sense of splitting the difference. The median voter is someone who barely thinks about ideology at all.
The strongest evidence for this view comes from forecasting. Morris’s two-input fundamentals model—based on economic conditions and incumbency—forecast Harris at about 48 percent of the two-party vote in 2024; she got 49.3 percent. That is a near miss. On conditions alone, Trump wins about nine times in ten. The three decisive states turned on 229,766 votes. That is not a story about persuasion. That is a story about fundamentals. Candidates matter at the margins, but the margins are tiny.
What does this mean for strategy? The Strategist’s Fallacy is the belief that you can win by offering the right combination of positions. The research says you cannot. You win by having the fundamentals on your side and by turning out your base. Swing voters are real, but they are not persuadable in the way campaigns imagine. They are movable by events, not by ads. WelcomePAC’s report Deciding to Win recommends a 2028 Democratic nominee willing to break with progressive advocacy groups. That is one interpretation. But the deeper lesson is that no nominee can escape the fundamentals. The voters do not think in left and right. The sooner strategists accept that, the less they will be surprised by elections.
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