>>804062politics is now polarized by age and education. you don't show you care about minorities to win those small minorities, but to show educated young people that you're on their side, on the side of "better things are possible" and "don't randomly be cruel to people to satisfy the perverse whims of cruel old bastards". the archetypal left-wing voter is an underemployed university graduate who reads newspapers, the archetypal right-wing voter is a retiree or petit-bourgeois bigot who watches AI conspiracy slop from a man in india.
look at british labour for what happens when a party associated with the center-left tries to "court the centrist and moderate right wing" by throwing immigrants and transgender people under the bus: it goes from polling 33% of the vote - already quite low because they backed the gaza genocide before the election - to polling as low as 15% - the lowest labour has polled since the 1920s, numbers that signal the end of labour as a viable party. meanwhile the green party goes from irrelevant to polling 16% or better.
you must stop thinking in terms of a median voter strategy. the name of the game now is to boost your side's turnout and suppress the other side's turnout. labour won in 2024, for example, only because the right-wing vote was split. similarly the conservatives won in 2019 only because of a gigantic wrecking campaign against the labour party by the full force of the british establishment (it then had a left wing leader). in the US, Kamala Harris took on advisors from British Labour (who advised precisely this center-chasing strategy) and that's why we're now in the midst of Trump's second term.