#And imo the Biden admin has been a pretty decent example of such a strategy!

[centrally-unplanned]

That Thompson quote in the previous post is more contextual than the typical response lets on - it was made in 1972. Elections were just a *lot* swingier back then. Its exaggerated - you see things like Reagan's electoral victory in 1980:

Which seems like a devastating win, but he only got 50.7% of the vote, Carter got 41.0% (and independent John Anderson got ~6), the shifts were just broadly distributed. Still, its definitely more swing than you see today. Politics was less sticky, outcomes more surprising.

There are a million reasons for that but one of them was certainly that information was more centralized. If you had a political opinion and you weren't a political insider or some kind of radical, you got the news for your opinion from hierarchical information sources; newspapers, television, connected political groups. In this environment the idea that you could just get some with charisma and new ideas to sweep the electorate and authentically change minds wasn't that fantastical. You don't have to play to the median, people's median isn't that settled, you can pitch another way and create a new median. And if you can get a short-list of organizations to agree with you they will cooperate in broadcasting that new idea.

This is the idea someone like Thompson has; it seemed to him like the "center" was defining the median for voters, and people occasionally did come along and shift what the center was about in new directions. So his agenda could have its turn under the sun, that was possible. Particularly in 1972, with the counterculture movement fading sure but still very recent in memory, that seems like a viable idea, even if yeah overstated (oh, a writer, overly focused on the role of media and media figures? Shock!)

Its pretty dead-in-the-water today. The idea that politicians or even presidents get to "set the national priorities" is antiquated - no one cares what they think. The information environment is much flatter, there is scant ways for a politician to tell voters to stop caring about immigration or healthcare and start caring about national defense or w/e. The electorate is more partisan, more confident, and more bottom-up in how it forms opinions. While presidents can highlight *new* issues and sometimes raise them to prominence, they really can't change minds much. Honestly its a wonder campaigning does anything at all!

Of course this is papering over the complexity of today as well, but overall its just a bad political environment for this whole idea of running someone outside the median who like radically changes things via the process of running for that election. They are probably just going to lose, and almost certainly won't get congressional majorities. You gotta pursue other strategies for change.