Would Warren or Sanders move to the center against Trump?

A paper written last year for the journal “American Politics Research” by scholars Brice Acree, Justin Gross, Noah Smith, Yanchuan Sim and Amber Boydstun studied this in a more systematic way and found the pattern of sticking with your core policy promises from the primary extended to recent Republican nominees as well.

Why aren’t the nominees flipping away from bold policy stances in the general election? First of all, a candidate often makes promises during a primary to appeal to particular constituencies. The candidate usually will need those same groups to be strongly behind him or her in the general election. (For example, Obama embraced universal health care during the 2008 primary in part to appeal to the leaders of major labor unions.) Also, flip-flopping on your core stances is likely to draw negative press coverage. Finally, recent Democratic nominees (Clinton, Obama, John Kerry and Al Gore) didn’t center their candidacies in the primary around the idea that they were the most liberal Democrat. So those four arguably didn’t take as many bold and potentially electorally risky stances as Warren and Sanders, who have made liberalism a centerpiece of their presidential runs.

But Democratic nominees in the past have made other concessions to the idea of “middle of the road” voters. The most prominent one has tended to be in their picks for vice president. The four most recent Democratic nominees all chose running mates whose role was in part to help the person at the top of the ticket appeal to more conservative voters.