Is Centrism Doomed?

Lee Drutman was cited by the Washington Post for his study on voting groups in the 2016 election.

In 2017, New America Foundation fellow Lee Drutman published a fascinating and widely read study of the 2016 election. He divided the electorate into four groups: liberals, conservatives, libertarians and, crucially, populists. These were voters who leaned liberal in economics, but conservative on identity issues. He found that Clinton, relying almost entirely on liberals, couldn’t carry the election. Trump voters, by contrast, were split between conservatives and populists. Though he technically ran as a Republican, Trump used an unorthodox mash-up of left-wing (anti-free-trade) and right-wing (anti-immigrant) stances to attract voters dissatisfied with the political establishment. In his own extreme way, he ran as a moderate. Which helps explain why 12 percent of Bernie Sanders primary voters then voted for Trump, and why 9 percent of Trump voters had previously voted for Obama.