Americans don’t think both parties are ‘too extreme'

An apparent deepening in the polarization of American politics has encouraged researchers to consider whether the Democratic and Republican parties are too extreme for the political tastes of a population who consider largely consider themselves to be moderate. Using national surveys on American perception of the two main parties Joshua Robison explores this question, finding that even as more Americans have started to view both parties as too extreme, most still only consider the party they don’t support as extreme. A lack of public knowledge about parties’ political and ideological positions, he writes, means that party elites can continue to push for measures that “moderates” consider extreme without great pushback from the electorate.