In political science* and economics, one of the earlier axioms that our current moment says no longer applies is that of the median voter theorem. Roughly speaking, in a two-party system, the candidate that gets closest to the true middle views of the electorate will get all the votes to the right or left of that middle (roughly half), and they’ll get roughly half the distance of any distribution of remaining voters that are in-between the two candidates’ positions. Hence they’ll have a majority of the vote and win the election. This theorem has some questionable assumptions, such as 1) voters can be aligned in a single dimension spectrum (i.e., that those all on the left think the same, and those on the right think all the same, if we use a familiar left/right spectrum), and 2) much more importantly in today’s world, they vote more on a distribution of policy decisions (i.e. left/right) and not on personality. Nevertheless, to the extent that it holds, we get less extreme results and more stable election outcomes.

This theorem is complicated in a system where one first has to win in a primary system (with one set of median voter positions that skew much more to the left or to the right) and then one has to move closer to the center in the general election without 1) alienating your base voters, and 2) do so in a way that is believable to those in the center. The latter is somewhat possible in a world of rational ignorance**–just look at “moderate” Joe Biden! The most famous example of this was Richard Nixon’s strategy of running to the right to win the primary, and then tacking to the center for the general election.

This brings us to Donald Trump and 2024. As he is most predisposed to tell us, he’s winning big in the polls. There is effectively no Republican primary–so why should I come to any debate? As a former president, he believes he is running as an incumbent, and acting accordingly. And the polls (especially national ones, which are irrelevant in a primary) seem to back this up. Indeed, that is the single biggest Trump strategy–projecting the inevitability of his nomination. And to the extent that Mr. Trump believes this, and he actually wants to be president again, he now wants to run to the center as fast as he can. Democrats have made clear they believe they are on the winning side of abortion politics and it will be their main campaign issue in 2024. And Mr. Trump, who boasted of getting rid of Roe v Wade, is now tacking sharply to the center (go to 23:49 and following to see Mr. Trump say this yourself). In discussion of an early heartbeat bill, such as the one Ron DeSantis signed, Mr. Trump said, “what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”

A terrible thing? A terrible mistake? To protect unborn children’s lives? Is everything just a deal to made? Is the only measure of success how artful the deal was? Obviously the politics of being pro-life are now more difficult, and clearly the Republicans have not yet figured it out. But Mr. Trump is clearly throwing the pro-life movement overboard. He suggested as much earlier, blaming 2022 losses not on his own hand-picked failures, but on conservative support of the pro-life position.

Iowa caucuses in 2012 and 2016 (the last two presidential elections without an incumbent) selected Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz respectively, who both hewed tightly to the social conservative agenda. It is true that Mr. Trump’s loss in Iowa in 2016 did not derail him. Yet if Mr. Trump loses Iowa, his whole campaign of inevitability may come in for a rough landing. So is he coasting to the nomination by running to the center as fast as he can, or is he going to compete? Karl Rove in the WSJ yesterday noted that Mr. Trump is finally engaging in Iowa after all, after being virtually non-existent apart from a few large rallies that don’t require the retail campaigning that Iowa voters expect:

It’s beginning to dawn on Donald Trump that Iowa matters.

Until now it looked as if the former president was devoting more time to meeting with lawyers than engaging with voters, so his recent burst of activity in the Hawkeye State is revealing. His notoriously cheap campaign dropped $700,000 on Iowa TV last week. He finally hired a director to oversee his Iowa ground game. On Wednesday he stopped in Maquoketa and Dubuque, and he vows to return to the state four times in October. That means that over the next six weeks he’ll spend about as many days in Iowa as he has over the past nine months.

Mr. Trump seems to be taking the social conservative base for granted. I’m not so sure that’s a wise decision on his part; time (and Iowa) will tell.

* Ok, I’m not a political scientist, just a part-time public choice economist, but I think I’m close enough here for the purposes of this brief post. I’ll wait for MCS, the true political scientist, to rebuke me if I’m too far off the rails!

** People are rationally ignorant about politics because the costs of gaining any knowledge of an issue (primarily time) are not worth the benefit (i.e., even if they are informed of some bad policy there is almost nothing an individual voter can do about it). So they are rational to be uninformed.