The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a trade agreement among 12 countries on the Pacific Ocean aiming to promote trade by reducing or eliminating over 18,000 tariffs that act as a barrier to US trade with the other 11 nations. After years of negotiations, the TPP was agreed upon in February of this year, but has not yet been ratified by Congress. Hillary Clinton initially favored this agreement, stating in a 2010 speech that "we know that [the Trans-Pacific Partnership] will help create new jobs and opportunities here at home."
During her campaign in the Democratic primary for the upcoming election this year, though, Clinton faced Bernie Sanders, who openly objected to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In order to remain competitive with Sanders among democratic voters on such a key topic for this election, Clinton began to shift her views on the TPP to the left. She claimed that she was against the agreement in a primary debate last October, announcing that it "didn't meet my standards."
Downs' Median Voter Theorem helps to explain Hillary Clinton's behavior here. If the median voter is decisive, then candidates will shift their views to be right at the median to ultimately win that determining vote. Clinton's initial view on the TPP was too far to the right for the audience from which she was campaigning to win votes, so she altered her position to better reflect the median voter's views, between Bernie Sanders and herself, regarding the issue of this trade agreement. This example supports Downs' claim that "parties formulate policies in order to win elections, rather than win elections in order to formulate policies."
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