Political Science Professor David Broockman's paper Should Moving to the Middle Win Candidates Votes? It Depends Where Voters Are was cited in an op-ed in The New York Times titled "The Democratic Brand Is Toxic in Too Many States."
Even with Donald Trump’s approval rating in the toilet and Democrats ahead in generic ballot polling for the House of Representatives, Democrats are steep underdogs to capture a majority of Senate seats.
To regain majority control of the Senate, of the 35 seats on the ballot in November, Democrats must win four controlled by Republicans, and there are very few obvious states that are within reach for a Democratic candidate. So if they take the House but fall short in the Senate, party leaders will probably just blame it all on a bad map, i.e., a difficult list of Senate seats on this year’s slate. The problem for Democrats is that all the maps are bad. Pick a year, the map will be tough.
Sure, Democrats have done an impressive job over the past decade, winning seats in places that Mr. Trump has won two out of three times — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
But the party’s brand has become so toxic to overcome in so many places that Democrats have often simply given up on the party’s label and instead throw their support behind independents like Dan Osborn in Nebraska and Seth Bodnar in Montana.
Another — better — idea might be for Democrats to try to change their brand. How would they do that? We know that, in general, more moderate candidates tend to do better.
But the advice to appear more moderate is both frustratingly vague and out of step with the mood of a base that increasingly demands tough fighters. Still, politicians can do better if they abandon unpopular issue positions while sticking to their guns on more popular ones — and that’s whether or not they cultivate an image as moderate per se.
This applies to all politicians — not just Democrats. Consider the current president. In 2016 he muted one of the, if not the, most potent Democratic attack issues, Republican support for Medicare cuts, by changing the G.O.P.’s position on that issue. He also backed down from past Republican support for Social Security cuts and conceded that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. He walked away from previous Republican opposition to same-sex marriage and allowing gay and lesbian soldiers to serve openly in the military. In his 2024 bid, Mr. Trump did it again, when, after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, he promised not to restrict abortion rights.
By changing what Republicans stood for, Mr. Trump changed the party brand. Changing the brand helped to turn former swing states like Iowa and Ohio into solid red states.
A new paper from the political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla offers some guidance on how Democrats might do the same. They recently conducted a survey experiment in which they polled voters about potential candidates but attributed different policy views to them. They found out that which positions they attributed to candidates made a meaningful difference in how voters saw them and their willingness to vote for them.