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A new poll from the New York Times shows potential Democratic voters want the party to move to the right, are happy with where it is ideologically, and rate socialism highly. Huh? www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-06-12...

'Voters are dumbasses with few real beliefs or understanding of policy' is the correct answer.

Yeah and “centrism” is a free-floating signifier that attaches to a lot of things, of which policy is only a small part. It’s a truism that “centrism” is something reasonable and good and moral. My guess is if you framed the question “should the Dems move further right,” it wouldn’t poll the same

I do think you have to be more creative about it than that, a lot of it is nonverbal signifiers, and a lot of it is discourse—Trump was perceived as moderate relative to Harris by low-info voters even though that’s an insane thing to believe, and it’s not because he pretended to be a moderate

but it is because of how a politician like Harris is coded, how the media talks about Trump, how low-info voters consume political news, etc etc. some of this stuff candidates can control, some they can’t, and some doesn’t even have to do with them personally just the wider discourse