The median voter theorem, or why major parties are relatively similar
When people are looking at our two major parties they're often dissatisfied. If you're a socialist or a libertarian or a Nazi then in most elections neither of the major candidates will represent your views. Well, this election we have someone who at least appeals to Nazis and we nearly had a candidate who called himself a socialist even if that wasn't totally accurate . But this election is a bit weird and usually the people who complain about the major candidates being close to each other have a point. Thankfully political science has an explanation for this: the median voter theorem. At this point I was going to give my own in depth explanation of it but I don't think I could possibly do a better job than Chris Hallquist does here . Please read that link because otherwise the rest of this post might not make too much sense to you. Or maybe you're already familiar with the theorem, in which case cool. The one thing I'd like to add to that...