Political donations are not a mirror of the electorate. They are a mirror of its angriest edges.
The people most likely to give money to a campaign are the people most animated by politics — and research on donor behavior has consistently found that individual donors sit well to the left or right of the median voter in their own party. Small-dollar fundraising, for all its democratic promise, sharpened this: the emails that raise money are the ones that alarm, and the candidates who alarm best raise most.
A politician reading their incentives sees it plainly. Move toward the middle and the checks slow down. Pick a fight on cable news and they speed up. Multiply that across every safe-seat primary — where the general election is decided by the most partisan sliver of voters — and you get a legislature that is reliably more extreme than the country it represents.
The result isn't that moderates lose arguments. It's that they rarely get a candidate to argue for. The largest bloc of American voters — people who want secure borders and humane immigration, market economics and a real safety net, free speech and basic decency — is treated as nobody's base, because it funds nobody's campaign.
That's the gap this site exists to close. We cover the news through one question: who is actually representing the majority in the middle, and what would make it easier for them to keep doing it?