“If a persuadable marginal voter can’t see ideological identity, like they can’t see ultraviolet or infrared light, why are pundits and the political class obsessed with it?” The question is Guerin Green’s, publisher of Daily Political Press, a Broadside News Group title, and it is the question a new seven-page file from Daily Political Press sets out to answer.
The obsession has a name. In October 2025 the data journalist G. Elliott Morris called it the Strategist’s Fallacy: the belief that voters hold concrete issue positions and ideological labels and match them to candidates the way a customer picks an entree off a dinner menu, so that the way to win is to tweak a candidate’s positions. He was answering Deciding to Win, a report published the day before by the centrist group WelcomePAC, which recommends that Democrats “affirmatively moderate” on immigration, crime and energy.
The political science behind Morris’s objection is sixty years old. Philip Converse sorted the 1956 electorate by how people talked about politics and found that only a small minority reasoned in ideological terms. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, in Democracy for Realists (Princeton, 2016), assembled the panel evidence that people join a party first and take on its positions afterwards. Morris’s own House model puts the premium for moderation at about 1.4 points of margin, down roughly 80 per cent since 2000, inside a plausible range from near zero to about three.
Daily Political Press has published the file at The Strategist’s Fallacy, checked: Morris’s argument as he made it, the research behind it, the 2024 margins by the state canvasses, and a page for what could and could not be verified, with a video walkthrough. The argument is Morris’s and is credited to him throughout. The spectrum is Green’s.
2024 by the fundamentals
The model, the margins and the state canvasses are on the incumbent.
In May 2026 Morris published a forecasting model with two inputs and nothing about the campaign: the president’s net approval in June, from Gallup, and the two-year average of the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index. Fitted to every election from 1956 to 2020, with 2024 held out, it forecast about 48 per cent of the two-party vote for Kamala Harris, with an 80 per cent interval from 46.6 to 49.9. She received about 49.3. On conditions alone, by his model, Trump wins that election about nine times in ten.
It was not only an American result. John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times found that governing parties lost vote share in all ten of the major developed democracies in the ParlGov dataset that voted in 2024, the first time that had happened in a record that begins in 1905.
The margin is where the explanations come from. Trump carried Pennsylvania by 120,266 votes, by the Department of State’s certification of 4 December 2024; Michigan by 80,103, as compiled from the state canvass; and Wisconsin by 29,397, by the Wisconsin Elections Commission canvass of 29 November 2024. That is 229,766 votes across three states, out of 155,512,532 cast for president: about 0.15 per cent. Morris rounds the same figures to 230,000 of 152 million; the file uses the state counts and says so.
Morris’s word for a result that close is overdetermined. Presidential approval, inflation, real income and candidate favourability each move a national result by at least twice the point and a half that decided 2024, so no single factor can be shown to have lost it, and the same defeat is cited as proof the party was too liberal and proof it was too timid. The takes, he writes, reaffirm their authors’ priors. His word for the exercise is projection.
G. Elliott Morris named the Strategist’s Fallacy in October 2025: the belief that voters hold positions and labels and match them to candidates like an entree off a menu. Guerin Green, publisher of Da
Broadside News Group’s full walkthrough — WelcomePAC’s Deciding to Win and Morris’s reply, who actually thinks ideologically, why the team comes before the positions, 2024 by the fundamentals and the 229,766-vote margin, what campaign persuasion is worth, and who the persuadable voters are in Morris’s own data. About fourteen minutes.
Philip Converse sorted the 1956 electorate’s open-ended interviews by how respondents reasoned about politics. By the figures usually reported from his 1964 chapter, 2.5 per cent qualified as ideologues and another 9 per cent came close: about one voter in nine. Roughly 42 per cent judged the parties by group interest; the rest judged the times, or offered no issue content at all. The file’s sources page flags those percentages as taken from secondary summaries, pending a check of Converse’s original table. Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe found in 2017 that Converse’s ideological innocence holds nearly as well today. Morris, in the Boston Review in February 2026, puts the ideological share at 10 to 15 per cent, and adds from his own surveys that many apparent “moderates” sit at the midpoint because they provide no ideological content at all.
Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, in Democracy for Realists (Princeton, 2016), call the menu model the folk theory of democracy and argue the causation runs the other way: people take a party from family, region, race and class, then take their positions from the party. Thomas Carsey and Geoffrey Layman (American Journal of Political Science 50(2), 2006) followed the same respondents through the 1992, 1994 and 1996 elections and found that voters who knew the parties differed on abortion, but did not much care, changed their minds to match their party. Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope (American Political Science Review 113(1), 2019) found that Republicans told Donald Trump held a position moved toward it, including toward liberal positions.
Voters do grade the party in power, but on a short window. Andrew Healy and Gabriel Lenz (American Journal of Political Science 58, 2014) found that people say they weigh a president’s whole term and in practice weigh the election year.
What Deciding to Win argues, and what Morris objected to
The report and Morris’s reply sit side by side on the report page of the file.
Deciding to Win, by Simon Bazelon, Lauren Harper Pope and Liam Kerr, was published by WelcomePAC on 27 October 2025 at decidingtowin.org. It draws on election results, public polling and online-panel surveys of more than 500,000 Americans between 13 November 2024 and 18 June 2025. Its thesis is that “since 2012, highly educated staffers, donors, advocacy groups, pundits, and elected officials have reshaped the Democratic Party’s agenda, decreasing our party’s focus on the economic issues that are the top concerns of the American people.” The remedy is to talk about costs and to “affirmatively moderate our positions on high-salience issues where voters distrust us and where progressive policies are unpopular, particularly on immigration, crime, and energy policy.” Part 11.4 sets the test for 2028: “Democrats should pick a nominee who understands what it takes to win elections in difficult terrain—and is willing to run on positions that majorities of Americans support, even if this sometimes requires breaking with the unpopular demands of progressive advocacy organizations, corporate interests, or the Democratic donor class.” Its evidence that moderates outperform is overperformance estimates credited to the elections site Split Ticket.
Morris answered the next day in his newsletter Strength In Numbers, crediting the report’s breadth of data and raising three objections. It ignores current polling showing Democrats recovering with voters who care about the economy. It says little about inflation, and treats 2024 as Democrat against Republican when it was incumbent against opposition. And it reads too much into noisy, unadjusted gaps between “moderate” and “progressive” candidates: in WelcomePAC’s own data, overperformance in one cycle predicts only 25 per cent of a candidate’s overperformance in the next.
His largest objection was the premise: the menu is how strategists decide, mapped onto voters who do not.
A better pitch should move a menu voter. Joshua Kalla and David Broockman (American Political Science Review 112(1), 2018) pooled 40 field experiments on campaign contact with nine of their own: across the 49, the best estimate of general-election persuasion is zero, with narrow exceptions for heavily targeted unpopular positions and for early contact that decays. Deciding to Win concedes as much in Part 4.10, field programmes having “minimal impacts on changing voters’ minds,” then recommends changing positions instead.
Broockman and Christopher Skovron (American Political Science Review 112(3), 2018) found the instruments misread too: 3,765 state legislators, compared with their own constituents, overestimated support for conservative policies in both parties.
Morris looked for the persuadable voter in 5,509 registered voters pooled from four of his surveys, January-April 2026. The real holdouts, who disapprove of Trump, will not commit to a Democrat and carry no Republican marker, were 3.4 per cent. Of them, 83 per cent were undecided, about 40 per cent had not voted in 2024, 76.8 per cent were pure independents, and prices (38 per cent) and jobs (21) outranked crime (3). His conclusion: engagement, not persuasion.
Immigration shows the cost of photographing opinion rather than forecasting it. Early in 2025 strategists told Democrats to go quiet on it; ICE’s net approval then fell from +16 in February 2025 to −20 in January 2026, and Democrats won statewide in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Virginia and New Jersey with nominees keeping left-leaning positions on immigration, abortion and health care (Morris, Boston Review, February 2026).
Morris’s charge that the report lists abolishing prisons, DC statehood and Medicare for All as 2024 agenda items could not be found in the live report and sits on the file’s could-not-verify page, not here. Every document the file rests on is on its sources page.
