Q&A: Professor Anthony Fowler Discusses the 2024 Presidential Election and the Median Voter

Professor Anthony Fowler's research applies econometric methods for causal inference to questions in political science, with particular emphasis on elections and political representation – and among his most recent work includes a study of the power of the median voter. In the wake of the 2024 United States presidential election, we sat down with Fowler to learn more about his thoughts on the election results.

Former President Donald Trump won the 2024 United States presidential election, including winning the popular vote for the first time. Does that mean that he’s closer to the median voter?

It may say more about the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, than it says about Trump. I think the standard median voter prediction was borne out in 2024: you had Trump, who's not moderate in an absolute sense but relatively moderate on policy preferences compared to other Republican leaders; and Harris, who's relatively extreme even relative to other Democratic leaders. Voters in the middle maybe didn’t like either one all that much, but they found themselves particularly disliking Harris in this campaign, giving Trump the win.

Most of our major candidates are extreme. We have good evidence that the typical Democratic member of Congress is well to the left of the median voter even in their constituencies, and the typical Republican is well to the right. In fact, it’s even true that the typical elected Democrat is well to the left of the median Democrat in their district, and the typical elected Republican is well to the right of the median Republican in their district. Both are out of touch – the question is by how much.

President-elect Trump is to the right of even the typical Republican in the United States on most issues – but he’s probably a little bit more moderate than your typical member of the Republican elite, say a Nikki Haley or Mitch McConnell. That’s not to say he doesn’t say extreme things or hold some extreme views on certain topics, such as immigration, but on other issues, he’s somewhat moderate, not your typical Republican.

On abortion, he moderated significantly; some have inferred that’s because he doesn’t care personally about the topic. While he could have come out more clearly, he did rule out federal action on abortion. Despite the idea that it should have been a winning issue for Democrats, Vice President Harris, however, basically said that she would accept no compromises on abortion, and she did not moderate her position in any way.

In the United States Senate, Harris was one of the five most liberal Democrats. In her public positions, she ran well to the left in 2019 and 2020. She tried to moderate a little bit, I think, in her rhetoric in 2024, but I think most voters didn't view that as very credible.

Were there other factors at play?

Certainly. I think increasingly there is a second dimension in American politics, which is, “How much do you trust the establishment?” This question is almost independent of the traditional left-right dynamic.

I think Trump is much closer to the median on that dimension. Most politicians are in the pro-establishment category, but there are a lot of regular voters who are thinking, "I don't have a lot of faith in universities, or in the New York Times, or in the bureaucracy,” and so forth. It was a dynamic that Senator Bernie Sanders captured when he ran for president in 2016 and 2020, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was certainly tapping into that base of support when he was polling at 20%.

Think, also, about Harris’s trumpeting of the endorsement of former Republican vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter, former U.S. Representative Liz Cheney. Dick Cheney is a foreign policy hawk and a clear member of the establishment class. While trying to win Republican votes certainly made sense for Harris to do, I think the choice of the Cheneys meant that Harris was further aligning herself with the establishment.  There are probably a lot of people in the middle who saw the endorsement and thought, “I don’t have a lot of faith in the foreign policy establishment; I don’t want us involved in more foreign wars; if anything, this makes me like Trump more.”

Had she actually moderated on policy and tried to win over people in the middle, that would've been effective. I think Harris could have easily won this election had she come out with, "Here's my economic plan that's sensible and appealing to regular voters.”

How did being Joe Biden’s vice president affect her?

She had President Joe Biden's record to contend with. Even though Biden was elected as the relatively moderate candidate, he didn't govern as a moderate. The things he prioritized were things that mostly rich college-educated people who live in cities cared about. He prioritized student loan forgiveness, green energy, and other progressive areas of focus. Those are things that regular working-class people in rural Pennsylvania do not care about, and which might actively turn them off. Yet when asked on The View, she could not think of a way she would govern differently than Biden.

How is a billionaire like Trump able to appeal to the middle?

Even though Trump is himself purportedly a billionaire, a lifelong celebrity who should be quite out of touch with the average American, he's somehow really good at retail politics, at seeming relatable to a broad set of Americans, particularly among working class people and people without a college degree. These are people, by the way, who normally don’t like the way they get talked down to by the establishment class.

Trump is a television personality and a brilliant marketer and self-promoter, and so he seemed right at home when he served food at a McDonald’s. Yes, it was a stunt, and everyone knows it. Still, he's enjoying himself while he's doing it, he's coming across as personable, and he's coming across in a way that's not demeaning – he’s not being patronizing, saying “Oh, I’m play-acting being a minimum wage worker.” He likes McDonald’s, and they like McDonald’s. Had Harris done a stunt at McDonald's, it would've come across as a stunt, as patronizing, as insincere.

What do you think of Democratic losses in the Senate?

Harris at the top of the ticket did not do them any favors. Harris was unpopular in 2024, and that seemed to hurt down-ballot Democrats. But: it is true that almost every incumbent Democrat running for re-election outperformed her. Some people, for instance, voted for Trump in Montana, but also voted for their Democratic Senator, Jon Tester, who significantly outperformed Harris. I think Jon Tester might've done better than any other Democrat relative to Harris – by about seven percentage points.

Jon Tester happens to be one of the most ideologically moderate senators right now. The only Democrat who underperformed Harris was Elizabeth Warren, who happens to be one of the most ideologically extreme candidates. Of course, the obvious irony is that Elizabeth Warren won re-election easily because she's coming from Massachusetts, which leans very strongly toward the Democratic Party. But there is a clear relationship between the ideology of the candidates and how well they did. It just so happens that the ideology is also correlated with the underlying partisan leanings of the states.

Despite his loss, you can’t look at those results and say, “Tester did a bad job.”

What do you make of the polling in this election?

Polls have been consistently off for the last several elections. The polls generally underestimated Trump's popularity and Trump's support.

There is a theory that some Trump supporters are shy and don’t tell pollsters they’re supporting him, but there's not a lot of strong evidence for that. We've tried variation in survey mode, for example. There's no evidence that a phone survey gives you different answers than an anonymous online survey. There would have to be lying on all the modes.

Perhaps people who support Trump are just less likely to respond to polls. Trump is certainly increasing his support among working class non-college educated people, and it could be that for some reason it's very hard to re-weight the data and get that right.

The third possibility is that the pollsters themselves subconsciously skew the data and their analyses in a way that's less favorable for Trump than they should.

What should the parties do if they want to win elections in the future?

They must moderate on policy, both economic and social policy. There is no magic bullet: one advertisement or one TV interview to win the election.

Most of the evidence we have suggests that it's very difficult to get the a person to moderate on an issue, so who you nominate matters. It’s a challenge, as we see, because the Jon Testers of the world were voted out in 2024, and the Elizabeth Warrens of the world are still in the Senate. There are people behind the scenes, but they're the ones recruiting candidates and they're the ones that are doling out resources and cash and so forth. Many moderates do not naturally want to run, so the parties – the people behind the scenes – must actually value moderate candidates and recruit them.