President Donald Trump has brought American democracy to the brink. But Democrats should not moderate any of their positions, for the sake of disempowering him.

This is a popular pair of positions among progressives, despite the apparent tension between them.

As the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, a Vox co-founder, argued last week, many of those most alarmed by Trump “don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win.”

Klein’s perspective isn’t hard to understand. There are inevitably trade-offs between political expediency and ideological purity. The less deference you give to public opinion, the greater your risk of electoral defeat. If failing to win the next two federal elections would imperil democracy itself, then erring on the side of ideological restraint seems prudent.

More concretely, to stop Trump from further consolidating his power over the judiciary, Democrats will need to win a Senate majority next year. And doing that will likely require, among other things, winning statewide elections in North Carolina, Ohio, and Iowa — all states that voted for Trump three times, the latter two by double digits in 2024. Making the Democratic Party more palatable in those places plausibly requires embracing more conservative issue positions.

Progressives have a few different answers to this argument. But the most sophisticated comes from the political scientists Jake Grumbach and Adam Bonica. In their telling, there is no contradiction between opposing Republican authoritarianism and Democratic moderation — because the latter does not actually confer significant political benefits.

Grumbach and Bonica have advanced this case in a series of articles and papers (one of which I covered previously). But their most prominent intervention came last month, in a Substack post titled “Do Moderates Do Better?” In that piece, the political scientists make two primary arguments:

• The supposed correlation between moderation and electoral success in House races is a product of biased methodologies. When one properly accounts for structural factors, moderate candidates did not do significantly better than progressive ones in 2024.
• Regardless, correlation is not causation. And when you use advanced statistical methods to isolate the causal impact of moderation on Democratic House candidates’ share of the vote, you find that the benefits are either small or nonexistent.

Other political data analysts have pushed back on Bonica and Grumbach’s claims. The statistician Nate Silver argues that they use an unreliable measure of candidate ideology and undersell the benefits of moderation in their models. The pollster Lakysha Jain insists that Bonica and Grumbach........

© Vox