Does Moderation Win Elections? The Nerds Go To WAR

Do moderate candidates do better in elections? It’s a question that has rocked the online world of election data nerds in recent days.

There has been hair pulling, locker stuffing, and swirly giving. Sorry, I mean, there has been online snark, Substack posts and replies, competing Twitter and Bluesky threads, academic credential waving, and accusations of bias.

What started this whole thing is a little metric called WAR, which is oftentimes used in sports and means “wins above replacement.” Basically, how well does a particular politician perform in an election compared to how a generic candidate from their own party would have done.

The folks at SplitTicket, helmed by Lakshya Jain, have been using this metric to analyze electoral politics for a while and have found that the benefit to being a moderate is notable. From 2018 to 2024, according to their data, Blue Dog Democrats did about 5 percentage points better than progressive Democrats in House elections.

The folks at Strength In Numbers, helmed by Elliott Morris, recently published their own version of WAR, showing a smaller benefit to political moderation, about a 1 to 1.5 percentage point benefit, with significant uncertainty bands around those numbers. Elliott concluded in an article that moderation is overrated in electoral politics.

This initial disagreement sparked a broader debate between other Substackers, academics, and election wonks who took one side or another.

Today, for the first time since this debate began, the two sides sit down together to hash it out on the GD POLITICS podcast. Joining me on this episode are Lakshya Jain and Elliott Morris.

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