I think if you're a campaign practioner or a practioner of electoral politics more broadly it's really important to be attuned to public opinion and to basically treat it as exogenous. Don't center your campaign on unpopular stuff is important advice!
Indeed, I think there are certain areas of The Discourse that way too flippantly ignore public opinion as an actual constraint on political action, believing it's not real or can be overcome with boldness or tactical audacity. And so reminders about the median voter are useful.
That said, yhe most interesting thing to me, as someone whose life's work is analyzing politics more broadly is that "public opinion" changes, & it changes in fascinating, remarkable often unpredictable ways over time. The alchemy of how that happens is why politics fascinates me
So in the broader sense of politics writ large, public opinion isn't exogenous, but *endogenous* to what "politics" is. And a lot of the work of politics writ large is the work of changing public opinion.
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