Once upon a time, it was a good electoral strategy. It worked for the Big Dog twice, trimming his sails to the breezes of opinion and sweeping up just enough voters, even with wildly diverse points of view, to get over the top.
But now and for the foreseeable future, triangulating to the center is a path to disaster. That's because the center no longer meaningfully exists. Embarking on a quest to find this mythical land of legend entails abandoning actual reality, resulting in the loss of voters who exist today on planet Earth.
Let's check out the Bill Clinton era in this chart from Pew Research so we can see why all that triangulating was good navigation back in the day. It's a pretty conventional chart, showing a big blob of voters in the middle, and only just starting to show mild signs of becoming bipolar.
In a setting like this, the center was the place to be, for pretty much the same reason that in a small town all the gas stations tend to be clustered together on the same corner. A charismatic candidate can position themselves about three microns to the left or right of the center and pick up almost everyone from their longitude on out to the nearest edge. Then the game becomes poaching just enough voters from the muddy purple zone, with only a small nod to your DFH or equivalent base.
How times have changed. Here's 2014, again from Pew Research.
[The chart is based "politically active" voters, which shows the strongest bipolar effect, but the effect is also present in the entire population and in likely voters.]
For the center-positioned candidate, it's a double whammy. Fewer voters to scrounge for in the center, and a vast population of voters to lose out at the edges.
The risk that comes with rushing for the imagined cornucopia of goods in the middle of the game is very high. If the "center" is the average of current Democratic and Republican positions, then to live in that place a Democratic candidate with have to take positions that are at least partially detached from reality as we know it.
Observant progressives will notice this little trip into the unreality dimension, and will once again face the dilemma of whether it's worth bothering to show up to vote against the wrong evil lizard. But now there are many more of us in that position than in years past.
To win the next cycle, Democratic candidates will have to do more than carefully positioning themselves on the left-right spectrum.
The winners of the next cycle will be those who actually believe in what they are saying.
Really believe, with an undisguised righteous passion that conveys to everyone that the election matters, and how much each vote matters.
By contrast, the worst possible strategy deserves a name, so we'll call it the "Romney Plan" - basically to say everything and mean nothing. Trying to appeal to each individual constituency as if nobody else is going to hear you, notwithstanding the fact that no potential candidate has been able to fart for the past two years without it making the news. Creating over time a mosaic of obvious pandering that ultimately makes voters like me give up on them.
There's an irony to the current bipolar demographics, which will be seen on the Republican side. Here in early 2015, with the comforting (but outdated!) image of the classic bell shaped electoral curve in our little minds, we imagine that the Republican candidate will go far right in the clown show primaries and then have to tack back hard for the general election, resulting in the ruin of gotcha sound bytes from a few months earlier.
But that's wrong. These demographics suggest that the winning clown can stay where they are in far right cloud cuckoo land and still have an excellent chance in the general election.
The winning candidates in 2016, left or right, will be those who stand for something.
Which brings up the nightmare scenario: A pandering, indecisive, poll-driven Democratic candidate could easily lose to a sincerely and consistently deranged Republican.
Fate brings us a gift of a true alignment of the stars. In the coming election cycle, and perhaps a few more to come, it will be possible to do well by doing good. Principled candidates who take serious progressive positions on issues like climate and inequality - and stick to those positions - will have the best chances of winning.
More Democrats in office - that will only happen with the advent of better ones.
Notes
It would be wonderful to stay just one level above the whole HRC sux/rox thing. My intent is to discuss the approach that a candidate needs to take this time around, whomever that may be got a given office.
Here is the Pew Research page on political polarization. I chose the charts for "politically active" voters rather than the entire electorate, which makes the bipolar demographic effect screamingly obvious (although Pew's research shows that likely voters are more polarized than the general population).
Whirlpool image at the top is from Disney - about caribbean pirates or something like that.
Evil lizards courtesy of So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish by Douglas Adams (some quotes here).
"On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
...
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in."