If Sanders is a rhetorical populist, then Clinton is one in a different, and more literal sense: She actually tries to cater to the majority of likely voters. The Clintons have a reputation for obsessing over the public mood, with Bill catching blowback during his presidency for relying “too much on constant temperature-taking, even scripting his message—right down to his actual words—to polling and focus groups.” That reputation has followed Hillary. Reason recently classified her as a “Focus Group Democrat,” and it isn’t hard to find comments on articles accusing her of believing “what the polls and focus groups tell her to believe.”

But isn’t this barometric sensitivity just a sophisticated method for responding to the largest possible coalition of voters? It’s a coldly efficient way of giving the people what they want, calculated to upset as few as possible.

Politicians aiming for the center mass of public opinion aren’t a recent development in Anglo American politics. The 19th-century British journalist Walter Bagehot fawned over conservative Prime Minister Robert Peel’s ability to do just that: “From a certain peculiarity of intellect and fortune, he was never in advance of his time. Of almost all the great measures with which his name is associated, he attained great eminence as an opponent before he attained even greater eminence as their advocate.”

Bagehot goes on to write that when it came to the great issues of the day—Catholic emancipation, the Corn Laws, criminal code reform—Peel was against them “as long as these questions remained the property of first-class intellects” such as philanthropists, speculators, and “austere” Whigs. Peel later advocated the same measures as soon as they “by the progress of time, the striving of the understanding, the conversion of deceptive minds, became the property of second-class intellects.”

Hillary Clinton, like Peel, is no prophet raging in advance of a cause. Instead, both politicians pursued synchronicity with the demands of the electorate, never outpacing the collective moral imagination with their own desires, and reframing compromise as virtuous inclusion.

Clinton’s style parallels that of Sir Robert Peel with respect to the big issues of the present day. In 2013, after spending the previous decade advocating civil unions for gay couples and claiming that marriage should remain between a man and woman, Clinton announced her public support for gay marriage. Why did she flip-flop? Because the public did. Gallup found that the majority of Americans began to support gay marriage right around the same time that Clinton changed her own position. PolitiFact gives her a “Full Flop” on the issue, which is a misleadingly simplistic way to frame it. A more useful description might be that Clinton has been in lock-step with the public, attempting to facilitate popular will, however fickle it might be.