Which of these is more important in presidential elections?

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Both are important. The trick is to rev up your base and get them to turn out for you while simultaneously not motivating the other candidate's base to turn out against you. This is where the Republican Party messes up: the GOP achieves great base turnout (even in 2012 with "RINO" Romney), but alienated enough voters who still would vote R down-ballot to vote for Obama and scared Democrats/Democrat-leaners enough to turnout against them.


As for the center, it's true that most people who identify as moderate and/or independent do still retain a significant ideological/partisan lean; the thing is that you need to convince enough "soft" Democrats/Republicans to support you.

Democrats have mastered this by emphasizing popular policies combined with being liberal enough to turn out the base while not to scaring away on-the-fence voters. Republicans, as we have seen, continue going too far to the right and make the Democrats' ads for them, thus they lose elections.

Republicans got enormous margins in the South and Great Plains states, but by losing that 1 - 4 percentage points in swing states, lost in 2012. It does them no good to get 60% in Alabama, Wyoming, and Oklahoma if they're losing Florida by just 70,000 votes, if the 2% they need in Virginia and 1.5% they need in Ohio evaporates.