nintendofan85
Good grief.
Moderates/centrists definitely benefit both parties, but it seems like that in the recent decades, they've fit in more with the Democratic Party, particularly as Bill Clinton moderated the party with his run for the presidency in 1992. However, since you did bring up universal health care, particularly not just the Affordable Care Act that was passed through Congress in 2009 and 2010, but Romneycare as well, which was passed when Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts in 2006 and was part of the reason Romney was such a weak candidate against Barack Obama when Obama was running for re-election in 2012-the Republicans' message since the passage of the ACA in March 2010 had been "repeal and replace" (which was their rallying cry for that year's midterms). However, as seen with the campaign Bernie Sanders ran for the 2016 election and, despite the fact that Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary (which her win was definitely questionable considering we're all well aware that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, as chair of the Democratic National Committee, tried to affect the results of the primary to favor Hillary Clinton), she then lost the election to Donald Trump, which has practically shown that the influence of Third Way has dissipated, at least in the United States. For example, the Sanders campaign caused Hillary Clinton to move to the left, while her husband actually moved even more to the center after being elected in 1992-as the Democrats faced heavy losses in the 1994 midterms to the Republicans following unpopular moves by Bill Clinton's administration where taxes were raised, and on the same subject as Romneycare and Obamacare, the unpopular "Hillarycare" plan of 1993, Bill Clinton's political positions were more towards the center when he ran for re-election in 1996 than they had been when he was first elected in the previous election.
However, that does lead me to another point-ever since Harry Truman was president, the Democrats have wanted universal healthcare. Many of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs were supposed to pave way for this, but Johnson couldn't pass this before he left office because of the massive Republican gains in the 1966 midterms due to the unpopularity of the Vietnam War (and the Great Society was starting to have its own popularity issues in the mid-late '60s). Hillary Clinton's efforts when she was First Lady in 1993 and 1994 clearly failed, which meant Obamacare's passage in 2010 made it the first time ever that the Democrats achieved their goal of universal health care. Of course, the Trump administration has attempted to repeal it, but the efforts tried last year failed. Point of the story is, I wouldn't call universal health care that radical, especially considering a substantial amount of Democrats today would prefer to have a single payer system anyways. But yes, as seen not just from the campaign Bernie Sanders ran, but also the primary wins of politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, centrists have clearly lost their influence in the Democratic Party. The Republicans had already started moving further and further to the right with its reaction against the Obama administration in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014 and that environment is how Trump gained so much ground in the 2016 primary and that support maintained itself into the election against Hillary Clinton. For lack of a better term, whenever the United States experiences a change in party in power of the presidency, the candidate that won is the reaction against the previous president, and Trump is clearly the reaction against Barack Obama. Likewise, Obama was the reaction against George W. Bush, Bush was the reaction against Bill Clinton, and Bill Clinton was the reaction against George H.W. Bush. George H.W. Bush was of course elected to the presidency when a popular Republican president was in office, but Ronald Reagan was the reaction against Jimmy Carter, just like how Carter was the reaction against Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon was the reaction against Lyndon B. Johnson. These midterms are also crucial in seeing if any reaction against Trump could affect the 2020 presidential election.
