How Voters Actually Decide: The Strategist’s Fallacy and the Limits of Persuasion

Every election cycle, campaigns pour billions into ads, mailers, and door-knocking, all aimed at moving voters. The implicit theory is simple: voters hold positions, hear competing arguments, and then choose the candidate closest to their views. Political scientist G. Elliott Morris named this belief the Strategist’s Fallacy in October 2025, describing it as the assumption that voters match candidates to their preferences like an entree off a menu. The problem, according to decades of research, is that this menu rarely exists.

What political science says about how voters decide is humbling for strategists. Most people do not carry a coherent ideological system in their heads. The classic finding, from Philip Converse, was that only about one voter in nine reasons ideologically—meaning they can consistently apply abstract concepts like left and right to specific issues. Later work by Christopher Kinder and Cindy Kalmoe found that share has barely moved in decades. Morris puts the figure at 10 to 15 percent of the electorate. That small slice is real, but it is not the battleground. The other 85 percent make choices through party loyalty, social identity, gut feelings about candidates, and reactions to events—not through a careful weighing of policy platforms.

This is why the moderates versus progressives debate often misses the point. The loudest argument inside parties is about which wing can win over swing voters. But the evidence suggests that persuadable voters are not moderate in the sense of holding a middle position on a spectrum. Instead, they are weakly attached, low-information, and responsive to short-term cues like economic conditions or a candidate’s perceived competence. They do not think in left and right; they think in "is life getting better or worse" and "do I trust this person." That is a different game entirely.

Consider the most cited experimental evidence. Across 49 field experiments, political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman found that the best estimate of campaign persuasion in a general election is zero. Not small. Zero. Ads, canvassing, and mailers do not move votes in a head-to-head race, because most voters have already anchored their decision by party identity or by a broader national mood. What campaigns can do is mobilize—getting their own supporters to show up—but they cannot convert opponents in any measurable way.

That null result helps explain another oddity: why so many elected officials seem out of step with their districts. Broockman and Skovron found that legislators in both parties overestimate how conservative their constituents are. They assume the public is more ideological than it is, and they act accordingly, often by moving to the extremes. But if voters are not ideological, then the moderates versus progressives framing is a distraction. The real divide is between engaged partisans and everyone else.

The power of fundamentals—the economy, approval ratings, and other structural conditions—shows this clearly. Morris’s two-input fundamentals model forecast Harris at about 48 percent of the two-party vote in 2024; she got 49.3 percent. On conditions alone, Trump wins about nine times in ten. The three decisive states turned on 229,766 votes. That is not a story of persuasion; it is a story of a narrow margin driven by underlying forces. No amount of clever messaging could have changed the basic shape of that race.

So what does the Strategist’s Fallacy mean for how campaigns spend money? If persuasion is near zero, then ads aimed at moderates versus progressives are largely wasted. The money should go toward identifying and turning out reliable voters, and toward shaping the national narrative before voters tune in—not toward last-minute appeals to undecided centrists. the claim we could not find in the report recent WelcomePAC report, Deciding to Win, reflects this logic. It recommends that a 2028 Democratic nominee be willing to break with progressive advocacy groups, not because that would persuade swing voters, but because it might reset the party’s image among low-attention voters who see only broad signals. The lesson is not about left versus right. It is about accepting that most voters are not listening to the argument at all.