Question

1. In Unit 6, you learned about the Median Voter Theorem and how politicians will do best in the election if they identify the median voter’s position in whatever constituency they are appealing to. Why does this strategy sometimes result in a candidate seeming to change his or her positions when moving from a primary to a general election? Now, give an example of a situation where you think a candidate either attempted to follow the median voter or a situation in which he or she did NOT attempt to move to the median voter’s position. Do you think the candidate in your example behaved strategically? Do you think he or she behaved ethically?

Answer 1

Why does this strategy sometimes result in a candidate seeming to change his or her positions when moving from a primary to a general election?

This is because they are targetting different sets of voters during primary and general election.
In primary, they are targetting the members of their own party. Both Democrats and Republicans have very different ideologies. A person who is member of any of these, usually resonates with the ideology of that party and firmly believes in it. This means that in primary the candidate has to be at the median of that ideology. But since the members overall are heavily on one side, the median remains to that side. As an example, a democratic candidate in the primary will have to appeal to registered democrats. Registered democrats are usually very left leaning. This will mean that the median of the registered demicrats will be pretty left itself, and hence the candidate will appeal to that and will have left leaning positions.

In general elections, not only the voters include people from right (republican voters), but a huge number who are ideologically at center and are not very heavily left or right leaning. The new median is now the center and not left. So the candidate now needs to pander to this new median, which is actually at the center, and so the candidate will shift position to appeal to as wide a range of voters as possible.

My example would be Hillary Clinton and she did change positions along the median when moving from primaries to generals. In primaries she was facing Bernie Sanders who had extremely far left positions on most of the issues. To counter those she set her positions as highly left in many areas (including wars overseas, Trans Pacific partnership etc) but as she moved to the general elections where she faced Donald Trump who was to the extreme right, she became more moderate on many of these issues.

The behaviour was indeed strategic as she was facing the general public rather than registered democrats. But it could not be said that it was ethical since ethically, one should take positions in which he/she truly believes, rather than changing them according to the requirement.