It sounds to me like the model is ‘the candidate needs to have a (party-aligned) big blind spot in order to be acceptable to the extremists(/base)‘. (Which is what you’d expect, if those voters are bucketing ‘not-seeing A’ with ‘seeing B’.)
(Riffing off from that: I expect there’s also something like, Motive Ambiguity-style, ‘the candidate needs to have some, familiar/legible(?), big blind spot, in order to be acceptable/non-triggering to people who are used to the dialectical conflict’.)
It seems I was not clear enough, but this is not my model. (I explain it to the person who asked if you want to see what I meant, but I was talking about parties turning their opponents into scissors statements.)
That said, I do believe that it is a possible partial explanation that sometimes having an intentional blind spot can be seen as a sign of loyalty by the party structure.
It sounds to me like the model is ‘the candidate needs to have a (party-aligned) big blind spot in order to be acceptable to the extremists(/base)‘. (Which is what you’d expect, if those voters are bucketing ‘not-seeing A’ with ‘seeing B’.)
(Riffing off from that: I expect there’s also something like, Motive Ambiguity-style, ‘the candidate needs to have some, familiar/legible(?), big blind spot, in order to be acceptable/non-triggering to people who are used to the dialectical conflict’.)
It seems I was not clear enough, but this is not my model. (I explain it to the person who asked if you want to see what I meant, but I was talking about parties turning their opponents into scissors statements.)
That said, I do believe that it is a possible partial explanation that sometimes having an intentional blind spot can be seen as a sign of loyalty by the party structure.