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A corollary to this idea, though, is that you appeal to these voters by appealing to their constituent identities, not with a split-the-differences moderate pitch. In other words, there are swing voters, but you win them with a turnout/enthusiasm strategy. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1295712768927191040
These aren't people who sit on the ideological midpoint between Biden and Trump, and you aren't going to win them over by finding that midpoint and somehow capturing it. You're going to win them over by making the strongest possible appeal on some issue that matters to them.
The error triangulators make is to assume the AVERAGE view held by this diverse group of cross-pressured people is the MODAL view, which leads them to treating "swing voters" as a single aggregated person whose views reflect the polling median.
(This is really the original sin of most US political analysis: to treat "public opinion" as if it were a single coherent opinion held by a single coherent person, with a single coherent rationale. It's not! It's just an aggregate of bunch of individual opinions, all different!)
Anyway, the result is that politicians often end up spending vast amounts of effort trying to make a case to people who don't exist. Ironically, the problem is worse for Democrats, who are often empirical enough to look at polls, but rarely empirical enough to understand them.
One other point I'd make, I'd guess: there's been a lot of debate over the past few years about whether "turnout" drives election outcomes, or "persuasion" does.
You can actually unify these views, though, if you understand voters as having a collection of interests.
You can actually unify these views, though, if you understand voters as having a collection of interests.
If a politician finds a way to appeal to, I don't know, college-educated Boomers, that will BOTH boost turnout among college-educated Boomers who are already in the politician's base, AND improve persuasion among college-educated Boomers who are cross-pressured swing voters.
The "persuasion" people are right that there are votes in the middle that genuinely switch sides. But the "turnout" people are right that elections are fought by appealing to groups that span the entire electorate, not just a tiny strip of changeable voters in the center.
