Quote (IceMage @ Jun 25 2019 10:12am)
In my experience, what David French struggles to understand is that extremists drive policy. Conversely, moderates wield far less power than their numbers would otherwise dictate.
At no point in pre-war Germany did the Nazi party achieve majority, and yet obviously they went on to dominate the state.
All that aside, I read through the study he's referencing, and I'm not that impressed. The questions are incredibly general. Asking Democrats "Are all police bad?", or Republicans "Should bad people be allowed easy access to guns?" will obviously elicit more moderate responses, which the study (produced by "More in Common") is obviously geared to generate. When we look at isolated events (e.g. reaction to Ferguson, versus Clinton's "tough on crime" initiatives in the 90s) we can see that the public perception on some of these issues have swung widely in either one direction or the other.