National elections in the United States are not decided by a national popular vote, but by the Electoral College, which means that the outcome almost always comes down to a handful of states with close races. This structural reality shapes everything about how campaigns behave, how parties choose their messages, and what political science says about the limits of persuasion. The most important thing to understand is that the vast majority of voters are not up for grabs in any meaningful sense, and the tiny slice who are—the swing voters—live disproportionately in a few states. That is why a shift of a few hundred thousand votes across three states can determine the presidency.
What political science says about how voters decide is sobering for anyone who believes campaigns are about winning arguments. Decades of research, beginning with work by Philip Converse in the 1960s, found that only about one voter in nine reasons about politics in ideological terms—meaning they hold a coherent set of abstract principles and apply them to candidates. Later work by Kinder and Kalmoe found that share has barely moved in half a century, and the data journalist G. Elliott Morris puts it at 10 to 15 percent of the electorate. In other words, voters do not think in left and right for the most part. They have identities, habits, and loyalties that are far more stable than any campaign ad or debate performance.
That stability is the foundation of party loyalty. Most people vote for the same party in most elections, not because they have weighed the platforms, but because that party is part of who they are—family, region, religion, or social group. The consequence is that the pool of persuadable voters is very small. In 2017, the corrections and limits political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman analyzed 49 field experiments on campaign persuasion in general elections. Their best estimate of the effect of a campaign’s direct contact with a voter is zero. Not small, not modest—zero. That finding has become a touchstone for understanding why campaigns spend so much time on turnout rather than conversion.
This is where the Strategist’s Fallacy comes in. G. Elliott Morris named the fallacy in October 2025, describing it as the belief that voters hold positions and match them to candidates like an entree off a menu. In reality, most voters do not have well-formed positions on most issues, and when they do, those positions are often weakly held and easily overridden by partisan cues. The fallacy leads campaigns to chase moderates with policy tweaks, assuming that a slightly more centrist stance will pull in undecided voters. But the evidence suggests that most undecided voters are not undecided about issues; they are undecided about whether to vote at all, or they are simply late deciders who will follow their party loyalty.
The moderation debate—moderates versus progressives—is therefore somewhat beside the point when it comes to who actually wins. Broockman and Skovron found that legislators in both parties overestimate how conservative their constituents are, which suggests that politicians are already more cautious than the public. But the public itself is not neatly arrayed on a left-right spectrum. The voters who matter most are the small number of people in competitive states who are genuinely torn between two identities or who have no strong partisan attachment. Those swing voters are not moderates in any ideological sense; they are people who are cross-pressured or indifferent.
The 2024 election illustrates the stakes. Morris’s two-input fundamentals model, based on economic conditions and presidential approval, forecast Kamala Harris at about 48 percent of the two-party vote; she got 49.3 percent. On conditions alone, the model said Donald Trump would win about nine times in ten. The three decisive states turned on 229,766 votes out of more than 150 million cast nationally. That is the entire ballgame: a margin of less than two-tenths of one percent of the national vote, concentrated in a few states, decided the presidency.
What does this mean for strategy? The WelcomePAC report, titled Deciding to Win, recommends that the 2028 Democratic nominee be willing to break with progressive advocacy groups. That is one argument. Others argue that turning out the base is more reliable than chasing swing voters. The research suggests both sides are partly right: persuasion is nearly impossible, but turnout is not. The real lesson is that national elections are not a referendum on ideology. They are a game of inches played in a few states, where the voters who decide are the ones who are least ideological—and least likely to be moved by any argument at all.
