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Its commonly assumed that candidates for the presidency - and by extension any office that involves a primary - have to moderate their stances on issues in order to win general elections. The rule of thumb is that candidates campaign to either extreme in order to win their party's nomination. This id because party identifiers dominate the primaries, but they are only a minority of voters in the general election. Extreme position do not help in general elections, so moderation is necessary.
But is this in fact true?
The author finds evidence that it is.
Here's his conclusion:
This research project moves American political research forward in two major ways. First, the research provides the first systematic evidence for the academic and popular intuition behind a substantial moderation in candidate messages after the primary campaign. By employing text analytic tools, this research gains leverage on a question that evaded empirical measurement for decades. Second, and perhaps more excitingly, this approach opens a new and fruitful area for future study. It remains an open question how well voters may, or may not, perceive subtle rhetorical differences. As with any campaign message, the fact that candidates seem to carefully craft their ideological moderation may not mean that the strategy has much of an effect on voters.
