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>One of the most commonly pointed to examples of Hotelling’s Law arises in politics. When candidates position themselves too far left or right, they can lose the vote of centrists.

Parties becoming mirror images of one another can be equally well explained by both candidates being bought by the same groups.

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But that hypothesis fails to apply to ice cream vendors case. If the hypothesis from Hotelling's Law already presents an explanation, why come up with a special hypothesis to describe this scenario?

Just because a rule applies to more cases doesn’t mean it’s the best answer for a given case (or that we should prefer it over other rules). Consider this example that’s true for many cases, but overall not a sufficient proof https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pólya_conjecture

In fact, I’d be willing to bet both hypotheses contribute to the overall effect we observe.

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