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Over on the catch all, @ELA stated that Trump shifted American politics away from running towards the middle.  

Others have blamed social media.  

I think there are many causes but I think this predates Trump by around 20 years.  

So back up to the 2000 election.  Of course we all remember Florida and Ohio and hanging chads and six weeks of "too close to call" but lost in the commotion of all of that is, I think, the beginning of the shift away from ELA's notion of running towards the middle.  

In the roughly week prior to the election it looked like Bush was going to get a solid win.  Gore needed to very nearly run the table in the swing states of that time and he very nearly did.  Bush actually underperformed relative to the last polls.  

In the post-election review period it came out that Gore had very nearly pulled off the upset NOT because he "ran to the middle" but because his campaign had operated a VERY effective voter registration and GOTV effort among likely Democratic Voters.  These newly registered voters didn't show up in the polls because most polls are of "likely voters" and they generally determine who is a likely voter by asking whether or not the person voted in the last election.  Those say they did are likely voters, those who say they didn't, aren't.  Thus, all of Gore's new voters didn't show up in polls of "likely voters".  

Fast forward four years:
Whatever you think of Bush himself, his people weren't idiots.  They saw what happened in 2000 and said "two can play at this game".  In the runup to the 2004 election I suddenly started seeing Republican Political operatives showing up at Church events, Gun Shows, basically anywhere that there was a crowd of likely Republican Voters.  

Now going back a bit:
What ELA referred to is known in PolySci as the Median voter theorem.  To explain it, suppose that Democrat @SFBadger96 and Republican @medinabuckeye1 are running for B1G Board Political Representative.  Now suppose (for simplicity) that only the 11 most frequent posters are going to vote.  If we line up those most frequent posters from L->R then number them with #1 being the most left-wing and #11 being the most right-wing then according to the theorem, whoever gets voter #6's vote will win.  Basically, if @SFBadger96 leans far enough right to get voter #6 he'll still get 1-5 because their only other choice is to vote for a Republican and similarly, if I lean far enough to the left to get voter #6 I'll still get 7-11 because their only other choice is to vote for a Democrat.  #1 and #11 will "hold their nose", grumble about "DINO's/RINO's" and vote for the guy on their side.  

Gore's strategy in 2000 was an end-run around the middle voter theorem.  Instead of fighting hard over voter #6 he attempted to engage non-voters #0, #-1, #-2, and #-3 to get them to vote and effectively push the middle from voter #6 to voter #4.  

The bottom line is that Gore's strategy was effective (not quite effective enough for him) because it is generally easier to convince non-voters who already agree with you to vote than it is to convince voters who disagree with you to completely change their worldview.  

At least since 2004 both Parties' primary focus has been on getting their people to the polls rather than convincing moderates that theirs is the best way forward as it was prior to that.  

Social media, IMHO basically poured gasoline on the fire but the fire was already raging.  

Social media makes it MUCH worse because people stay in their own bubbles were (from my example below) EVERYONE agrees that she really "got" me.  

I've seen literally countless videos on Facebook and YouTube where the hook is basically "watch this liberal get owned" or "watch this conservative get owned" where if you actually watch the video with anything close to an open mind, nobody got owned.  The two sides stated their position.  You could literally take the EXACT same video on a given issue and package it for Liberals as "Watch this conservative get owned" then package it for conservatives as "Watch this liberal get owned".  

I think the big thing Trumps team realized is #6 is voting left.  Theres no convincing them.  But #9, 10 and 11 might have some friends.  They were disengaged, because they thought there vote was taken for granted.  But some of the purple states were only purple because we thought the distribution 1-11 was equal.  Instead of fighting for #6, go convince 9, 10, and 11 to vote.

HRC had a million personality and record problems.  But her main issue was that she kept fighting for #6, and while she may have had 1-2-3, she didnt convince any of them to vote 

Had Trump lost in 2016, I think we were on track to see the status quo.  I said in 2012 that the GOP needed to make a major shift and concede a lot of social issues if they were ever going to win a national election.  Trump threw that whole thing on its head.  Now some 2s vote Red and some 9s vote Blue, and Im curious to see how it shakes out

To explain it, suppose that Democrat @SFBadger96 and Republican @medinabuckeye1 are running for B1G Board Political Representative.  Now suppose (for simplicity) that only the 11 most frequent posters are going to vote.  If we line up those most frequent posters from L->R then number them with #1 being the most left-wing and #11 being the most right-wing then according to the theorem, whoever gets voter #6's vote will win.  Basically, if @SFBadger96 leans far enough right to get voter #6 he'll still get 1-5 because their only other choice is to vote for a Republican and similarly, if I lean far enough to the left to get voter #6 I'll still get 7-11 because their only other choice is to vote for a Democrat.  #1 and #11 will "hold their nose", grumble about "DINO's/RINO's" and vote for the guy on their side. 

Doesn't that assume that there's a normal distribution amongst most likely voters?  If so, I think that could easily be flawed in the cfb board example, and almost certainly flawed in American politics at large. 

Doesn't that assume that there's a normal distribution amongst most likely voters?  If so, I think that could easily be flawed in the cfb board example, and almost certainly flawed in American politics at large. 

If you take away the R/D labels then it doesn't make any difference.  

Liberal and Conservative are relative terms.  When I was in law school, for example, I was generally considered the "resident conservative" in school but I would sometimes go to breakfast with my dad and a group of his buddies and at those breakfasts I was the "resident liberal".  It wasn't that I flip-flopped, it was just that, as I said, Liberal and Conservative are relative terms.  No matter how far left or right a given group of 11 voters is, #6 is still the middle voter.  In my Republican-leaning County #6 is a (nationally) moderate Republican.  In @SFBadger96 's neighborhood I would guess that #6 is a (nationally) far left Democrat.  Regardless, there still IS a middle voter.  

Well...I have some thoughts.

1) The Cold War ended.

Societies without an existential outside threat turn on themselves. Existential threats bring people together. With the end of the Cold War, our focus turned more and more on each other. This is a strong historical pattern. We came together (briefly) during the beginning of the "Global War on Terror" because we felt threatened, but not long after, the outside threat dissolved (or at least become much less significant), so we went right back to the infighting that we've always been good at, but that takes on a larger role when we don't have the existential outside threat.

2) Data.

We have gotten better and better at analyzing data. That has been a consistent theme over the years, and, yes, regarding the Al Gore point, by 2000, our political machines were more effective at analyzing the data and acting on it. We knew going into the 2000 election that it would be very close. We didn't know how close, but it wasn't a surprise. More surprising to the non-data crowd was the relative ease with which Obama was re-elected in 2012. Team Romney really thought they had it in the bag. Obama's team was really good at analyzing who they needed to get to vote and where. I think that was an eye opener for everyone. 

3) Media / Social Media.

Back when most of us were young, there was a local paper that people read, local news broadcast around 6pm, then a national news broadcast at 7 pm. Your choices were CBS, ABC, nor NBC. Then Fox (not Fox News) joined the picture and--at least in our neck of the woods--put their broadcast at a different time to try to capture different people. That largely meant that we consumed essentially the same national news, and we all consumed more local news.

Then cable news proliferated, the internet blew up, and the idea of local news being one's primary source for understanding what was going on around you became an anachronism. The number of swing states and swing districts right now is--I think--at an all time low. Why? Because most news is national. So Republicans and Democrats have become much more homogenous. And all of them are much more responsive to national news than local news. 

Elections (competitive ones) are won by a few percentage points. More than 5% is a blowout. So it's not voters 4-7, it's voters 47-53 (or if we only have eleven, it's voter 5 and no one else). High engagement voters are very unlikely to be swing voters. Most of them (me certainly included) made up their mind a long time before the election. Lower engagement voters are the target, but given how media is more and more self-selected, we're seeing fewer "swing" voters, because more and more people get only targeted information. Targeted media does not encourage swing voting. 

New poll reveals growing number of Dems want party to move in new direction

I have some sort of larger thoughts about this political mess, but I kind of wonder how much that kind of polling exists coming out of any election?

Like, I feel like in 2021 and 2013, republicans were pushing for certain kinds of moderation for the sake of building a bigger coalition, and that didn’t really come to pass. 

Then again, it could be some polling bias as well, as moderation usually sounds better than not. Not that Democrats don’t need to rein in some stuff that I find deeply annoying, but I also think a sizable chunk of the party is trapped in an ineffective centrist spot.