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In recent years, there has emerged a broadly shared sense that political moderation is dying. Joe Biden's victory in the Democratic primary has been widely interpreted as the last gasp of an exhausted tradition, after which he will hand over the reins to the party's left. Meanwhile, moderates have been an endangered species in the Republican Party for going on two decades now. The decline of political moderates lies at the root of many of our fundamental governing problems. As American political parties have become increasingly captured by their ideological extremes in recent decades, the space for cross-party coalition-building has shrunk. Where moderates were once critical to establishing coalitions across party lines, both parties' leaders today have established a hammerlock over the agenda in Congress, allowing only single-party alliances to form except under very unusual conditions.

The share of Americans who say they're independent has climbed considerably, according to Gallup's quarterly party affiliation data. In the late 1980s, roughly one-third of Americans identified as Democratic, Republican or independent. Now, 40 percent or more identify as independent, while the share who identify as Democrats or Republicans has fallen to around 30 percent or lower. he problem is that few independents are actually independent. Roughly 3 in 4 independents still lean toward one of the two major political parties, and studies show that these voters aren't all that different from the voters in the party they lean toward. Independents who lean toward a party also tend to back that party at almost the same rate as openly partisan voters.