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Notes -
The middle drops when the parties rely on negative campaigning to energize their (more extreme) base at the expense of the middle, who are usually already annoyed by politics. Negative campaigning affects partisans differently than non-partisans. When the middle drops out, the party that is marginally more effective at turning out their base win.
My intuition is that the opposite happens because there's more people in the middle, and so pandering to the middle is more useful. At least in swing states where pandering actually matters.
Is there any actual evidence of moderates voting less than extremists?
Pew research shows consistent voting is a U-shaped curve.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/
That link is super interesting, thanks for sharing.
Two comments:
The U-shaped graph about the "political activism graph" directly speaks to the idea that the "middle is dropped out". What this graph doesn't show is that this phenomenon is getting worse (i.e. that the middle today are voting less than they voted 20 years ago). I interpreted your previous points as the middle is dropping out even more than it used to, and I don't see evidence of that.
What there is evidence for in your link is that the middle is getting smaller and the tails of the distribution are growing larger. This is different than "dropping out" (which I interpret to mean not voting but continuing to have the same beliefs and staying in the middle). It seems to me that the actual polarization of beliefs is what's causing the polarization of discourse/policy and not the fact that the middle has stopped participating as much.
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