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“Great Political Moderates” skyrockets to #276,423 on Amazon’s best sellers list

By streiff Posted in 2008 — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

In my view, which I’ve articulated often on this list, there are two great myths in American politics. The first is that candidates have to run to their base to get elected and back to the center to win. I’ve been voting since Ford-Carter and I’m hard pressed to find an example in my adult life of that actually working. The second is that you have to win moderates to win. Well, yes, in the sense that you have to win goatherds and longshoremen. But in the sense that moderates control the election, no. Moderates have to vote for who the political base, left and right, has nominated or they have to stay home and it is much more important to get your base out in droves on election day than to woo moderates and alienate your base.

Now comes the Cooperative Congressional Election Study which seems to add empirical weight to my subjective view. An op-ed in today’s Washington Post breaks it down.

Read on.

The story of 2006 was that regular Americans were sick of partisan divisions in Washington. The vast and consensus-hungry middle asserted itself in November, the narrative went, finally ordering the parties and their childish politicians to stop fighting and to work together.

After the vote, bipartisanship was all the buzz, and moderation the wave of the future. But something happened on the way to the evening campfire and s'mores. House Republicans started complaining about Democrats riding roughshod into the majority, refusing to consider their amendments to legislation. President Bush announced that he wasn't going to let the opposition of congressional Democrats stop him from sending 21,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq. Meanwhile, Democratic leaders trashed most of Bush's domestic policy proposals as soon as they were announced in his State of the Union address.

One explanation for all this is that politicians are acting against the will of their compromise-loving constituents. Another is that Republicans and Democrats are simply being good representatives. We think the evidence supports the second interpretation.

Instead of relying on self-identification of conservative, liberal, or moderate the researchers compared voter attitudes on 14 national issues:

the war in Iraq (the invasion and the troops), abortion (and partial birth abortion), stem cell research, global warming, health insurance, immigration, the minimum wage, liberalism and conservatism, same-sex marriage, privatizing Social Security, affirmative action, and capital gains taxes.

And crosstabbed these attitudes with how the person voted.

What did they find?

When we combined voters' answers to the 14 issue questions to form a liberal-conservative scale (answers were divided into five equivalent categories based on overall liberalism vs. conservatism), 86 percent of Democratic voters were on the liberal side of the scale while 80 percent of Republican voters were on the conservative side. Only 10 percent of all voters were in the center. The visual representation of the nation's voters isn't a nicely shaped bell, with most voters in the moderate middle. It's a sharp V.

Ten percent. While admittedly ten percent can cost an election one has to consider how much effort one needs to spend sucking up to the squishy center and what the cost will be on turnout to the 45% who agree with you on most issues regardless of how they self-identify.

I submit the “moderate” electorate is a toothless political tiger. And for once I have company:

The evidence from this survey isn't surprising; nor are the findings new. For the past three decades, the major parties and the electorate have grown more divided -- in what they think, where they live and how they vote. It may be comforting to believe our problems could be solved if only those vile politicians in Washington would learn to get along. The source of the country's division, however, is nestled much closer to home.