Seven widespread misunderstandings about politics. 1. The Democratic Party’s elected officials, staffers, and donors are on average very progressive compared not only to the median voter but to most of the rank and file people who vote for Democrats. 2. The public’s persistently angry mood is not a demand for large policy changes, almost all changes generate backlash and the biggest electoral overperformers are wrong-party governors like Andy Beshear and Phil Scott who don’t do very much. 3. Third parties are most likely to succeed when the differences between the two big parties are small (1992) or at least wrongly perceived to be small (2000) not when they’re both seen as too extreme. 4. Donald Trump’s behavior is very extreme but the main way that his policy platform differs from Mitt Romney’s 2012 platform is that he’s more moderate on social security, Medicare, gay rights, and abortion. 5. How much progress you make on Issue X is more a function of how much you’re willing to drop or compromise on issues A, B, and C than of how aggressively you emote about X. 6. The qualities that are good for winning primaries and raising money are unrelated to (and in some ways antithetical to) the qualities that are good for winning general elections. 7. Increasing political polarization reflects deliberate choices made by highly engaged elite actors and is not an emergent property of the mass public.