"...And among the broader citizenry, where elections are decided, the GOP's complaint is entirely irrelevant.
It's not often that I find the pajama boys of Vox.com worth reading, but this Ezra Klein column makes an interesting point:
"It's not that Trump is a moderate Republican.
And he's the kind of moderate that really exists, not the kind of moderate Washington likes to pretend exists.
What, after all, is a "moderate"?"
The way it works, explains David Broockman, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, is that a pollster will ask people for their position on a wide range of issues: marijuana legalization, the war in Iraq, universal health care, gay marriage, taxes, climate change, and so on.
The answers will then be coded as to whether they're left or right.
People who have a mix of answers on the left and the right average out to the middle — and so they're labeled as moderate.
But when you drill down into those individual answers you find a lot of opinions that are far from the political center.
"A lot of people say we should have a universal health-care system run by the state like the British," Broockman told me in July 2014.
"A lot of people say we should deport all undocumented immigrants immediately with no due process."
Because the first position is "left" and the second position is "right", the pollsters split the difference and label such a person a "moderate".
But he isn't actually a moderate, so much as bipartisanly extreme.
In practice, most "moderates" boil down to that:
They hold some leftie and some rightie positions.
The most familiar type of "moderate" in American politics are the so-called "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" red governors of blue states - Christie Whitman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Pataki and (in his Massachusetts incarnation) Mitt Romney.
In practice, they usually turn out to be not all that "fiscally conservative" because it turns out the social liberalism comes with quite a price tag..."
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