On Wednesday, November 17, the Progressive Policy Institute hosted a lively discussion on how Obama and the Democrats could win back independents, who broke so strongly for Republicans in 2010 after breaking solidly for Democrats in 2006 and 2008.
The event featured: Stan Greenberg, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner; William Galston, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution; Will Marshall, President, Progressive Policy Institute; and Lee Drutman, Senior Fellow, Progressive Policy Institute.
For those who weren’t able to attend, we offer an audio recording:
[audio:https://www.progressivefix.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/11.17.2010Restless_Independents.mp3]
If you want to download as an mp3 to listen to during your commute or your morning jog right-click here and “save link as…”
The last three elections have been the most volatile three elections in a long time. One has to go back to 1942-1952 to find so much consistent turnover in the U.S. House – that was the last time when at least three consecutive elections resulted in pick-ups of 20 or more seats by one party or the other (then it was five consecutive elections). And no single party has picked up as many as the 65 seats the Republicans will probably gain (once all the dust settles on still disputed races) since the Democrats won 75 seats in 1948 – after losing 56 seats in the prior election.
This is a remarkable change from what had been the norm. For 20 years, between 1986 and 2006, there was only one election (1994) in which one party picked up more than 10 House seats from the prior election. Incumbents who ran for re-election were winning upwards of 98 percent of the time, a state of affairs that led many onlookers to worry about the fate of democratic accountability: Was something fundamentally broken when incumbency meant near certainty of re-election?
Over at The New Republic, David Fontana argues the new volatility is likely an improvement over the old incumbency safety net:
Whatever the explanation, the reduction in the number of safe House seats is probably good for American democracy: If the parties have to defend nearly all their seats every cycle, instead of concentrating on overstimulated swing districts, they will deliver more political information to voters across the entire country. Both major party candidates in many districts will have to run advertisements, host town hall meetings, and participate in debates. In addition, a Congress that changes hands more often is less likely to become complacent, staid, and corrupt—and it may be more open to experimenting with new programs and acting on new ideas.
Having just witnessed the last election, I’m not so sure a competitive election meant particularly high-quality debates and information, and it’s going to be hard to convince me that more advertising of the kind we were seeing would be a good thing.
Moreover, contra the “complacent, staid, and corrupt” thesis, I think there is something to be said for members of Congress who have been around a little while. It takes some time to understand how things work on Capitol Hill, to build relationships, and to learn some of the policy substance. I’ve never been a big fan of term limits because I think that what it essentially does is further empower permanent special interests, who welcome each class of fresh, green lawmakers with a lesson about “how things work around here.” Lacking their own independent expertise and often dependent on an equally inexperienced staff, the new lawmakers become even more dependent on lobbyists and special interests than their predecessors, who they spent all election blaming for being captive to special interests.
Moreover, if the new members have to worry about re-election from the day they get into office, that doesn’t leave much time for actual policymaking.
One reason for the increased volatility may be the fact that increasingly polarized parties are making it harder and harder for middle-of-the-road voters to get what they want, and so they keep switching back between Republicans who are too conservative and Democrats who are too liberal, each time trying to correct for their past choices. It’s a process that Dartmouth political scientists Joseph Bafumi and Michael C. Herronhave labeled “leapfrog representation.”
I’m not sure what the solution is. Fewer safe seats has its obvious pluses for democratic accountability. But I’m not so sure it’s meant that the quality of representation is improving, nor that it is going to improve. Nor does it necessarily improve democratic accountability if the volatility is driven by some combination of middle-of-the-road voters never being happy with their elected officials (too liberal! No, too conservative! No, too liberal!) and a “throw-the-bums” out mentality if the economy is doing poorly.
But probably one reasonable conclusion is that electoral competition by itself is not a sufficient solution to our democratic deficit of hyper-polarized politics and substance-free, talking-past-each-other campaigning.
In unfinished business from last Tuesday, there are still eight House races unresolved, after 11th district of Virginia Republican candidate Keith Fimian conceded to Rep. Gerry Connolly. While Reps. Ben Chandler of KY and Jerry McInerny of CA hold leads with scattered ballots still out and recounts possible, Republicans appear to lead in the other six races (involving Democratic incumbents Jim Costa of CA, Melissa Bean of IL, Tim Bishop and Dan Maffei of NY, and Bobby Etheridge of NC, and Solomon Ortiz of TX). If all current leads held, Republican gains would come in at 65, but my guess is that one or two of the Democrats now trailing will pull out a win.
The unresolved gubernatorial races are now down to just one, in Minnesota, where Republicans still bitter about the outcome of the 2008 Senate race seem determined to delay certification of Mark Dayton’s election as governor as long as they possibly can.
As the vote counting winds down, of course, the post-election interpretation battles are just now warming up. There are, of course, partisan differences, with Republicans tending to treat the results as a historic and perhaps semi-permanent repudiation of Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, liberalism, socialism, the New Deal, elitism, progressivism, or you-name-it.
Democrats are more divided, with some drawing big (and often varying) lessons from the defeat, and others stressing structural factors that made the results inevitable and/or lessened its predictive value for the future. The former, “big lessons” camp is itself divided between progressives who think Democrats lost because they discouraged the party base and compromised too much with Republicans and Blue Dogs (and/or failed to take the kind of radical steps that could have actually revived the economy), and centrists who think Democrats “overreached” by trying to implement an agenda that the economic emergency made undoable and unpopular.
The “structuralist” interpretation (which I happen to largely share) was succinctly summarized by Ruy Texeira and John Halpin of the Center for American Progress:
Why did the Democrats decisively lose this election? It’s not really a mystery. The 2010 midterms were shaped by three fundamental factors: the poor state of the economy, the abnormally conservative composition of the midterm electorate, and the large number of vulnerable seats in conservative-leaning areas.
Much of the argument over what happened and why will inevitably revolve around the big swing in self-identified independent voters between 2006-08 and 2010. Are these the same voters, or different subsets of voters (i.e., was this a pure “swing” in voting behavior, or at least partly an illusion of changes in self-identification and turnout patterns?)? Is the “swing” attributable to factors other than independent identity (e.g., age), or to a genuine change in ideology, or to a rejection of “Obamaism,” or to a continuing rejection of the status quo across administrations and party regimes, or to simple unhappiness about the economy? The answers to these questions have a large bearing on how each party should act in order to improve its performance in 2012.
One thing that is relatively clear is that the Republican “wave” broke pretty evenly across the electoral landscape, at least in House races; regions where Democrats did relatively well (e.g., the Pacific Coast) are just more favorable to Democrats. Here’s how Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight explained it:
Rather than a realigning election, then, 2010 served as more of an aligning election: congressional districts behaved less independently from one another, and incumbency status mattered less. Instead, they hewed tightly to national trends and the overall partisanship of each district. Most of the incumbent congressmen whose districts had been outliers before (mainly Democrats like Representative Gene Taylor, whose district gave just 31 percent of its vote to Barack Obama, but also a couple of Republicans like Representative Joseph Cao) were forced into early retirement.
In other words, there was a general, national shift in favor of Republicans that produced relatively predictable results. That’s true whether you believe the shift involved a sea change in the ideological views of the electorate or just typical midterm turnout patterns and a typical reaction to a bad economy. A similar shift towards Democrats in 2012 would produce similar Democratic House gains—with the exception of the advantages Republicans are now poised to achieve through redistricting.
So why do these post-election interpretive arguments matter? Well, to state the most obvious factor, if Republicans accept a structuralist interpretation, they are likely to be very cautious about advancing a radically conservative agenda, since the likely 2012 electorate is going to produce semi-automatic Democratic gains, which may also be augmented by any improvements in the national economy. If, to cite another example, Democrats accept a “big lessons to learn” interpretation, it would dictate a significant change in strategy for the Obama administration and congressional leaders; unfortunately, the progressive and centrist versions of this interpretation point in very different directions.
Here’s how Bill Kristol, Fox News contributor and editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, summed up a panel discussion I attended at the conservative American Enterprise Institute:
This is a truly distinguished panel, and one I’m happy to say that’s fair and balanced. We have (former Republican Senator from Missouri) Jim Talent, a responsible, respectable hawk. We have a slightly crazed militarist in Tom Donnelly, and a really insane hegemonic imperialist… me. It’s the correct spectrum of opinion.
The crowd chuckled its DC chuckle, and Wild Bill began. As it turned out, he was ironically prophetic – these people are batshit crazy. That tens of newly-elected Tea Partiers – folks who have never had much to say on national security and foreign policy issues – are now taking their cues from these jokers is downright terrifying.
But before diving into the political angles, here’s what makes these nutcases tick:
My suspicions were first aroused when former Senator Jim Talent (MO) blamed Bill Clinton for Iraq. Would that I were joking! Indeed, Talent bemoaned Clinton’s decision to scale down the size of the military in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. He correctly claimed that we were “fully deployed” during Iraq and Afghanistan, meaning that we simply didn’t have the numbers of troops necessary to properly resource both conflicts. It’s painfully and unfortunately obvious that Talent learned exactly the wrong lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan:
How much money and how many lives would it have saved if we’d have had 14 divisions instead of 10 and had been able to do in Afghanistan at the same time as we were (doing) in Iraq? … The blood, the lives, the people who were dying… we could have been years ahead of that schedule!
In other words, not only was invading Iraq the right call, we should have gone bigger and harder. It’s just too bad that all those people had to die and we had to waste all that money there because Bill Clinton decided to cut the size of the military after the Cold War.
Is Jim Talent a co-author on Decision Points or something? And here I was thinking that the decision to go to war without fully understanding what we were getting ourselves into caused all the slow progress.
Then there was Kristol’s fundamentally misguided view of defense spending. And that’s odd because he starts out with a correct general premise: “We should cut what should be cut and shouldn’t cut what shouldn’t.” That’s all well and good, provided you think that there are things to be cut. So over to you, Bill:
The best possible spending you can have is defense spending! We got out of the Great Depression by having a big defense build up…. The Pentagon has plenty of shovel ready projects!
F-22? No way! Foreign aid? Why not? It was deliciously ironic that while Kristol supported the idea of foreign assistance, he was open to restructuring its $45 billion budget; at the same time, Kristol lauded Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), incoming House Appropriations chairman, saying Ryan “knows how little can be saved in the defense budget — maybe $20 billion.” Pssst: Bill, that’s almost half of the foreign aid budget you think is big enough to reexamine. It’s also half of State’s.
It all seems so obvious to Talent: The defense budget “is affordable. To argue that it’s not affordable just isn’t right.” It’s especially affordable if we keep cutting taxes, right Jim?
Talent wrapped it all up in a nice big Fox News bow by tying alleged American declinism to Obama’s nefarious plan to nominate Joseph Stalin’s ghost as Tim Geithner’s replacement: “A socialized economy will not let America remain a great power.” But hold on there –- does a socialist want to “position our nation for success in the global marketplace” via a “strong, innovative, and growing U.S. economy in an open international economic system that promotes opportunity and prosperity”? Then Talent has some explaining to do, because that’s what the president says in this year’s National Security Strategy.
Thankfully, there was one area these mental dwarfs didn’t completely screw up: New START. Let’s be clear: Their partisan glasses won’t let them whole-heartedly endorse a very sensible treaty. Instead, they’re holding it hostage to more missile defense spending. But they’ll vote for it… hopefully.
Now, this all gets incredibly fascinating when you put it in a political context. The major take-away from this session is that the conservative establishment is pissing down their collective leg at the Tea Party’s soon-to-be dominant position on the Hill. Their plan is to co-opt the Tea Party by supplying it with mainstream conservative positions in an area the Tea Party doesn’t spend much time thinking about.
Kristol liquored up new Tea Partiers in hopes of bringing her home after the prom:
I think the Tea Party gets a bum wrap. They don’t believe we should lose wars, they don’t believe we should weaken the military, they do believe the world would be safer if Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons.
Jim Talent poured a few shots into Kristol’s punchbowl by hitting the “DC Republican establishment” (note to Talent: you’re a member.)
People who sat around and didn’t do what had to be done in 2001-2004 (specifically: Don Rumsfeld)… it’s a little much for them to be all up in arms because one Tea Party candidate said something that sounded vaguely not quite correct from the point of view of a strong U.S. foreign policy.
They’re pandering, and hard. Rand Paul doesn’t know it yet, but the Tea Party’s biggest spending hawk is about to vote for an ever-increasing defense budgets soon enough.
It was a mind-blowing Friday morning for yours truly, but was very reassuring in a way: The conservative establishment is as out of touch and irresponsible as always on national security, and they’re trying to take advantage of the strongest but most impressionable subset of their caucus. That’s why now more than ever, progressives have to offer strong, smart, rational approaches to U.S. national security, military, and foreign policy challenges.
Yesterday, the New York Times Week in Review section devoted a whole page to time series exit polls, all of which showed how Democrats lost ground in almost every single possible demographic cross-slice this election: women, whites, Protestants, Catholics, old people, even young people.
But one demographic slice was especially telling. It was the 41 percent of the population who said that their family’s financial situation was worse today than it was two years ago. They voted for Republicans by a 65-to-35 percent margin. What’s remarkable is that in 2008, this group of voters (then 42 percent of the total) broke 71-to-28 percent for Obama. And in 2004, it broke 79-to-20 percent for Kerry! But in 1996 and 2000, this category broke solidly for Bush! These are remarkable swings – what can explain them?
Likewise, the shifts have been the same for the smaller slice of the electorate saying their financial situation has gotten better. These folks broke 60-to-37 percent for McCain in 2008 (and 80-to-19 percent for Bush in 2004), only to break 60-to-40 percent for Democrats in 2008. Again: remarkable!
A number of possibilities seem implausible. One is that Democrats started doing much better financially with Barack Obama as President, and Republicans started doing much worse, leading a massive shift in the make-up of the “financial situation worse” category. This seems highly unlikely. A second possibility is that the demographic basis of this category is consistent, but just strongly, strongly anti-incumbent. This also seems highly unlikely, given what a large percentage of the electorate this makes up, and how much voting usually breaks down along partisan lines.
Rather, the most likely explanation, and one that is consistent with a good deal of political science research, is that voters’ perception of the how well they are doing depends largely on whether their party is in power. As one study notes: “a robust finding in the literature is that partisans evaluate the economy and its prospects more positively when the president is of their own party, and more negatively when the office is held by someone of the opposing party”
In many ways, this is remarkable. It is not particularly difficult to objectively compare one’s finances from two years ago to today. Yet, somehow having your party in power seems to change your evaluation.
In 2008, 24 percent of voters said their family financial situation was better today, 34 percent the same, and 42 percent worse; In 2010, just 14 percent of voters said their financial situation was better, 43 percent about the same, and 42 percent worse.
(Voters who say their family situation is about the same tend to be split much more evenly between the two parties: In 2008, they went 53-45 percent against the Republicans; In 2010 they actually voted 51-to-46 percent for Democrats)
So the declining economy has reduced the share of the electorate thinking their financial situation has gotten better from 24 percent to 14 percent, and this has hurt the Democrats. This may not be an entirely objective measure, but in a down economy, even partisan subjectivity is only so powerful. This has obviously hurt Obama and the Democrats.
But the larger issue here is that it’s very hard for partisan voters to assess the economy and even their own financial conditions objectively. There are real partisan filters at work here.
Which means that even if things are objectively getting better, there are still a large number of Republican voters who are going to think – in opposition to actual empirical evidence – that their own finances are getting worse, perhaps because they can’t conceive of an economy getting better with a Democratic president in charge. (Though partisan Democrats would be equally guilty in thinking their finances were getting better when they actually weren’t.)
This poses obvious challenges for Obama. If the economy does pick up (as most predict it will), improving objective conditions should help Obama’s approval rating and 2012 prospects to some degree. But even objective improvement will not be enough to convince many voters. Maybe more rhetorical attention to this will help (I don’t know the literature on this in great detail). But even that will probably have limited impact, since most voters hear only what they want to hear (confirmation bias).
A maddening challenge indeed. Good luck, President Obama.
Now that the dust has cleared a little bit and the first round of post-election analyses are in, one emerging storyline is that the electorate has grown more conservative. But before Republicans go off and claim a mandate, a couple of caveats are in order.
Beware the shifting independents. Much has been made of the shifting independents, who, according to exit polls, went from breaking 57-to-39 percent for Democrats in 2006 to breaking 55-to-39 percent for Republicans in 2010. Independents, who made up 28 percent of the voters in this election, are a difficult category to analyze, since many actually vote a lot like partisans even though they call themselves “independent” (for various reasons). As I’ve explained in an earlier post, it makes the most sense to think of independents in shades of independence, and the more truly independent the voter, the less ideological but also the less engaged and less politically informed the voter. All of which is to suggest that the independent voters who shifted from red to blue probably don’t really care much about ideology. Rather, they are most likely anti-politics and above all want to see more jobs and a recovering economy. They didn’t vote for an ideological crusade; they voted for the hope of a better economy and out of a need to blame somebody (the party in power) for their woes.
Beware the shifting electorate. It’s pretty clear that the voters who turned out in 2010 were, on average, a bit older and a bit whiter than the voters who turned out in 2008. Had younger voters and African-American voters –who remain the most reliably Democrat demographics – turned out at 2008 levels, at least a few of the close House and Senate races might have flipped the other way. In part, this was entirely predictable, since voter turnout in mid-terms is historically two-thirds of what it is in presidential elections, and youth and minority voters tend to be most likely to not be paying attention for mid-term elections. But if they turn out again in 2012 at 2008 levels (and as long as Obama is on the ballot, there is good reason to think they will), then a decent number of the Republican freshmen could be one-termers. Republicans should be careful of mistaking a more conservative voter turnout this time around for a more conservative electorate.
Beware the pendulum. In 2006, Democrats picked up 21 seats, and in 2008, they picked up 31 seats. Many of those pick-ups were in solid Republican districts, and so of the Republican pick-ups on Tuesday, 22 were in seats that had been solidly Republican in 2002-2006, and 15 were in seats that had been solidly Republican in 2002-2004. In other words, almost two-thirds of the pick-ups were simply reversions to ideological-demographic expectations. But Republicans also expanded into blue territory, picking up 22 seats that were solidly Democratic in 2002-2006, seats they might not be able to keep. As Ed Kilgore has explained, like all waves, this one “definitely has an undertow.”
America continues to be a 50-50 country, with a soft non-ideological middle of anxious, cranky, and sometimes fickle voters who don’t trust politicians and aren’t particularly happy with their choices. Majorities of voters now have an unfavorable view of both Republicans (52 percent) and Democrats (53 percent). Yet what’s remarkable is that even among those voters who had an unfavorable view of the Republican Party, almost one in four (23 percent) still held their nose and pulled the lever for the GOP. By comparison, only 10 percent of the voters who held an unfavorable view of Democrats voted blue anyway. Taken together, we now have more than a sixth of the electorate voting for a party of which they have an unfavorable view.
In short, this election can be explained simply by noting that older, whiter conservatives turned out in greater numbers than younger, more diverse voters, and non-ideological, performance-oriented independents decided to blame Democrats this time around. Neither of these reflect a dramatic change or are necessarily permanent conditions of American politics.
To fully appreciate the scope of the Republicans’ midterm victory – and the nature of the Democrats’ political predicament – look at the map.
In Congressional contests, Democrats flipped just three House seats across the whole, wide country, and they were in the traditionally blue bastions of Delaware, Hawaii, and New Orleans. They won two open Senate seats (in Delaware and Connecticut) but those have been held by Democrats for decades.
Republicans advanced everywhere except the West Coast, where they picked up just one House seat in Washington state. Their gains were mostly concentrated in the Midwest rustbelt and the upper South. With the exception of black belt regions of the South, Latino-dominated south Texas, a smattering of blue in Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and a few Rocky Mountain districts, America’s vast interior is solidly red.
The West Coast (including Hawaii) and New York/New England (excepting New Hampshire) are the only remaining Democratic strongholds. The geography of defeat lends credence to GOP claims to represent the American heartland against bicoastal elites.
Republicans also won a passel of governorships and state legislatures across the Midwest. Democrats, in short, got slaughtered in working class America.
Republicans won working-class whites by a crushing, 63 to 34 percent margin. “They have taken the brunt of this recession, particularly the men, but Obama looked as if he was not engaged with it,” pollster Stan Greenberg told the National Journal. “Health care created a sense that he was not focused on the jobs issues and economic issues, and they were very angry.”
The Journal’s Ron Brownstein notes that, “In all, 47 House Democratic losses so far have come in districts in which the level of white college attainment lags the national average; just 16 came in districts that exceed that average. Talk about blue-collar blues.”
But in fact Democrats badly underperformed with white voters in general. College-educated whites also backed GOP candidates, by 58 to 40 percent. Where Democrats held onto their seats, they ran closer to even among college-educated white women while rolling up huge margins among minorities.
Nonetheless, the political map sends Democrats an unmistakable message: you are not connecting with ordinary working Americans. This is only in part a reflection of the current economic crisis, and the evident failure of President Obama’s policies to spur recovery. After all, blue collar whites have been alienated from Democrats for a generation. That should be a source of constant embarrassment to the party of the people.
Many liberal commentators, echoing Thomas Frank, have argued that blue collar voters’ antipathy to Democrats reflects their cultural conservatism. GOP demagoguery on “values” has blinded these voters to the reality that Democrats are on their side on economic issues. But the conspicuous absence of “God, guns, and gays” from the 2010 elections actually make them a pretty good test of this proposition. This time, there’s no question that blue collar voters rejected Democrats on economics rather than values.
All this underscores President Obama’s core challenge: crafting a credible plan for rebuilding America’s productive base. This isn’t a cyclical challenge; it’s not a matter of more public spending to boost demand. It’s a structural challenge which requires modernizing U.S. infrastructure, removing obstacles to entrepreneurship and innovation, seizing leadership in clean energy, and revamping tax and regulatory policies to promote economic growth.
Incredibly, however, some liberals are contemplating a blizzard of new federal regulations with the purported aim of putting Democrats on the side of the middle class by demonizing Wall Street banks and big business. The last thing blue collar Americans need is an economic morality play in which they are cast as victims. What they need, and what progressives owe them, is not a condescending populism, but a practical plan for economic success.
On the eve of the Iowa caucus in late 2007, Mark Schmitt, editor of The American Prospect, wrote an influential essay titled, “The ‘Theory of Change’ Primary”. The thesis of the piece was that Barack Obama’s frequent paeans to bipartisanship were not to be understood as the naivety of a political Pollyanna who would be rudely awakened upon taking the reins of power. Rather, Schmitt argued, appeals to bipartisanship were a tactic that President Obama would use to make Republicans an offer they couldn’t refuse: join with your colleagues across the aisle to enact the progressive policies the country demands, or reject bipartisanship and bear the wrath of voters in 2010.
Obama’s theory of change—as interpreted by Schmitt—has not worked out so well. Half the country supports repealing the healthcare reform bill, half say Democrats are too liberal, and half think that “the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses”. While the lackluster economy clearly played a major role in ushering in the sweeping gains made by the GOP on Tuesday, progressives need to recognize that Democratic losses were not simply due to bad luck. Progressives overreached, which may or may not have been worth yesterday’s shellacking but which certainly calls for a change in strategy over the next two years. By taking seriously the theory-of-change strategy and recognizing that the 50-50 Nation continues to govern national politics, progressives can come back in 2012.
There are limits to blaming the economy for Democratic losses. Most strikingly, the exit polls last night revealed that Republicans won a majority of the national House vote even among the one in three voters who said something other than the economy was the most important issue facing the country. No, the theory-of-change strategy failed because the priorities Democrats pursued and the specific solutions they offered were not popular enough that Republicans felt any pressure to go along.
Nowhere was this truer than for health care reform, where controversies over government intervention into medical decisions, deficits, Medicare cuts, illegal immigration, and abortion gradually eroded the fragile support for reform among moderates. Democrats, oversimplifying polling that showed support for “health care reform”, convinced themselves that the time, budgetary resources, and energy spent on pushing through their particular vision of reform would trump the anemic jobs picture in the midterm elections. (And simmer down, public option advocates—there is absolutely no evidence that the purer original reform proposals would have produced a better outcome politically.)
Abandoning the “it’s-the-economy-stupid dodge” will be crucial for progressives moving forward, because in the most important respect the Administration finds itself right where it was in January of 2009. The country is mired in an economic downturn, with few positive signs on the horizon. Progressives can passively wait and see and allow the 2012 election to depend on what happens to the economy between now and then. Alternatively, by taking seriously the theory-of-change strategy, the President and Congressional Democrats can improve their chances of success next time and minimize the damage should the economy remain lousy.
Taking the theory-of-change strategy seriously means discarding the naively hopeful view that the 2008 election was a mandate for progressivism. As I wrote the night of that election, that view profoundly ignored the evidence from 2008 and political history since the Clinton years. The 50-50 Nation lives, and the Administration will have to stake out positions that are both popular and on which Republican-led gridlock will be met with disapproval from moderate voters. Such positions will often be met with howls of protest from the left, but if Democrats are smart, they will look to President Clinton’s success after 1994 as a model for how to get another bite at the apple in two years.
For instance, the easiest way to continue providing some stimulus to the economy is going to be via tax cuts. Rather than continuing to push for the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers, Democrats should instead advocate for ex-budget director Peter Orszag’s proposed two-year extension of tax cuts for everyone. Such a stance would be both pro-stimulus and anti-deficit. Both positions are important, for while the economy is the overwhelming priority of voters, the broad question of the size, scope, and effectiveness of government is second, and this is where Democrats’ weakness really lies.
Democrats could also take a moderate position on foreclosures and the barrier to growth that underwater mortgages present. Rather than bailing out distressed homeowners—which polls show commands only weak support, due to perceptions of irresponsibility on the part of homeowners who took out mortgages they could not afford—Democrats could propose incentives for lenders and loan servicers to refinance the mortgages of distressed borrowers. For instance, Ben Bernanke has suggested allowing the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure “shared equity” mortgages, whereby lenders would offer lower interest rates in return for an agreed-upon stake in the home’s equity upon purchase or refinancing. Democrats could also offer tax breaks or loans to make up the difference between the selling price of a home and a (bigger) mortgage payoff. This would help homeowners seeking to move for better economic opportunities who are not in danger of foreclosure or delinquency.
Welfare reform is up for reauthorization, and President Obama is in a strong position to preemptively lay out proposals that promote individual responsibility but that also fund the block grant more generously in response to data showing that the program’s growth has not nearly kept pace with the rise in joblessness. Furthermore, he could advocate responsible fatherhood provisions and other family-oriented policies, consistent with his past championing of such initiatives.
On immigration, Democrats should abandon their proposals advocating a general pathway to citizenship—a hopeless cause that will always be seen as rewarding law-breaking—and embrace the DREAM Act, coupled with tougher enforcement. The DREAM Act gives undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as minors the chance to earn residency if they serve in the military or complete some college. It addresses a fairly sympathetic group—the sons and daughters brought over the border by their parents, who never chose to break the law but who now face severe restrictions on their ability to get ahead through higher education because of their lack of documentation.
Finally, on deficit reduction, Democrats should use the housing crisis as an opportunity to begin a conversation around the distortions introduced into the economy by tax subsidies (such as the mortgage interest deduction’s complicity in the mortgage and financial crisis). Larry Summers has suggested that a global cap could be placed on the amount of itemized deductions a taxpayer could take, which would be progressive while avoiding fights over this tax provision or that one. The President can ask whether the federal government should really be subsidizing the purchase of second homes and vacation homes.
Democrats used the first two years of Obama’s first term to take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make big changes in domestic policy. Progressives may differ in their evaluation of whether the cost has been and will be worth it, but what is clear is that if 2012 is to turn out differently than 2010, they will have to scale back their ambitions in the next two years.
Picture the seventh grader who just brought home a report card full of Cs and Ds. After getting chewed to pieces by his parents, he points to the lone bright spot:
“C’mon… It’s not all bad.. I did get a B+ in art!”
“Art? ART?!?!” the overbearing and despondent father retorts, “Tell me how you’re getting into college with a B+ in art!”
That’s where national security stands as a political issue after this election: A bright spot that the electorate doesn’t much care about. The message from this election on national security is therefore somewhat simple: National security is not on most voters’ radar screen right now, and will stay out of sight until national security is threatened.
In the broad range of national security topics, only Afghanistan so much as registered as an issue this cycle, and barely so: a paltry 8 percent of respondents to a CNN exit poll indicated that the war was their chief concern. Of those, 57 percent voted Democratic, which hints at a (very) quiet confidence in the president’s handling of the war.
Even as it’s not at the top of the issues list, the electorate still supports the president on national security, according to a mid-September Democracy Corps poll. Since there have been no major national security issues in the ensuing six weeks, we have to assume the president’s 53 percent approval rating (42 percent against) stands. In a way, it’s a remarkable achievement for a president whose party has historically suffered in the polls when it comes to national security, something we call the “national security confidence gap” around here.
Despite the positive polls, the Democratic base (possibly in bed with spending hawks in the Tea Party) will likely turn its focus again to Afghanistan. Following Obama’s kept-promise on Iraq, the left will still expect a draw-down begun by mid-2011 in order to come out in force for the re-elect. The drawdown won’t begin in earnest until 2012, but a mid-2011 announcement will at least adhere to the letter of the president’s promise. There’s some wiggle room for progress, but not much.
As for the new Congress, if their performance to date is any indication, Republicans will feel empowered in the wake of this election to pick a few fights. To date, they’ve gone out of their way to hit Obama politically on every attempted terrorist attack. Those attacks have largely wasted their breath to this point, failing to shake public confidence.
But long-standing conservative bugaboos of Gitmo, missile defense, foreign assistance and potentially DADT loom large. (I’ve heard rumors that DADT will definitely be addressed in the coming lame-duck period, however.) Buck McKeon (R-FL) is the incoming HASC chairman and a big proponent of missile defense, so watch that in particular.
This opens an interesting gambit on Pentagon spending: Some sort of defense budget restraint is coming, and there’s probably at least bipartisan acknowledgment of that general principle, but I’d be shocked if this loose consensus included HASC Republicans. News today suggests the military’s $50 billion intelligence budget will be stripped from the Pentagon’s topline and moved under the DNI’s control. Is this just a sleight-of-hand that will substitute $50b more of weapons spending?
These fights will be a painful distraction for the administration, but should not dilute the White House’s core competency: keeping the country safe. Various forces will continue to make progress in Afghanistan frustrating, but the White House should continue to tout its successful record of taking the fight to al Qaeda in Af/Pak, scoring important diplomatic victories against Iran, and defending Americans against terrorist attacks. Continue to do this, and progressives will continue to make strides against the national security confidence gap.
The smoke has cleared; only the maimed and the dead remain on the battlefield. They are, for the most part, Democrats. The job of carting them off will take weeks; the post-mortems will take even longer. And yet progressives — we with our fetish for soul-searching — should reject a new, indulgent round of autocritique, or at least recognize that there is only so much to reflect on. The electorate’s rejection of Democrats is a lot of things, but a referendum on the quality of our ideas it isn’t.
How can that be? Isn’t a rebuke of this magnitude by definition a rejection of a party’s ideas? Well, it is if the ideas were carefully inspected and considered by an informed electorate. But sobriety has been hard to come by this election season. And what we tend to forget is that, before our discourse got sucked into the Fox-powered Tea Party vortex, our ideas were actually popular across the spectrum. Far from dogmatic and divisive, the policies that progressives have pushed in recent years have been sane, sensible fixes that have drawn support from left, right, and center.
Take cap-and-trade. Only the truly delusional still think that climate change and our voracious consumption of fossil-based fuels are nothing to worry about. Cap-and-trade was an innovative solution to the problem, harnessing the market — and eschewing command-and-control regulation — to bring about a reduction in carbon emissions.
Or take health care reform. Despite cries from left and right, the Obama administration got reform generally correct, setting us on a path to cutting costs and increasing access, all while leaving a system that Americans had grown accustomed to intact.
Or infrastructure. Economists of all stripes believe that we need more stimulus to spur economic activity. Every American who uses our roads, bridges, and water supply knows that our infrastructure is crumbling. In light of those needs, President Obama pushed through billions in infrastructure spending and just recently proposed a new $50 billion infrastructure bill.
All of these are good ideas that have achieved a certain degree of consensus, or at least support from moderates. An original version of cap-and-trade was co-sponsored by John McCain and was backed by moderate Republicans in the prelapsarian days before the Tea Party’s rousing. Health-care reform: As Jonathan Cohn noted, “Obama’s plan closely mirrors three proposals that have attracted the support of Republicans who reside within the party’s mainstream” — the most prominent of whom is Mitt Romney, whose health-care legislation in Massachusetts is a fairly close sibling of the national reform passed this year. As for infrastructure, money for more spending on the nation’s backbone was supported by Republican senators like Kit Bond and George Voinovich (both retiring – no coincidence) in an earlier jobs bill vote.
In all these cases, an urgent public problem was identified, and sensible, pragmatic solutions were proposed. But we no longer have politics that can accommodate the sensible and the pragmatic. The same John McCain who co-sponsored cap-and-trade now rails against it. Romney and Republicans who supported previous iterations of the Obama health plan have nothing but calumny for reform. Meanwhile, the only news of conservatives dealing with infrastructure is when they shrink from the challenge, like Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey backing away from a proposed, and badly needed, tunnel to New York.
Over and over again, progressives have come up with solutions to our problems that can be embraced by the moderate middle. But in these last two years, we’ve seen that no matter how good and moderate the ideas are, it doesn’t seem to matter.
In this dilemma lies the priority for the pragmatic progressive in these next two years. The fact is our ideas are good. They are sound. Progressives of the Obama era have brought an innovative, reformist sensibility to government that prizes empiricism and problem-solving above all. Yet the party across the table has pulled back and shown little interest in engaging. They want us to keep coming to the table with more concessions — while hardly offering any concessions of their own. If we keep whittling down our ideas to meet their whims, our ideas will be hardly worth enacting at all.
We must, of course, never slow our indefatigable search for new ideas – it is what defines progressivism. But the paramount challenge, for these next two years at any rate, is finding a new politics. The calls for a new radical center are all well and good, but we need to remember that that’s where our ideas already are. It’s the right that has abandoned that center. The consensus ideas of yesterday have become the Marxist plots of their 2010 campaign. And sensible ideas have little chance of growing in political soil parched of sense. Will the part of the conservative movement that still cares about fiscal responsibility, fact-based argument, and good-faith dialogue resurface? Will they make their voices heard against the know-nothings and the ideologues who have taken over their party?
No doubt progressives should continue to be on the lookout for all who are sober and serious about solving our nation’s problems. Challenges must be issued and coalitions of the willing must be sought. But we shouldn’t allow the emergent faction of hysteria and irresponsibility to sway us from a core conviction: that when one already occupies the reasonable center, standing one’s ground is the reasonable thing to do.
In the next few days, we’re going to be hearing a lot about how the Democrats lost “independents,” who, after breaking for Democrats in both 2006 and 2008, broke hard this time for Republicans, and for the third straight cycle, voted against the party in power.
And while it’s clear that “independents”, who now make up 37 percent of the electorate (as compared to 34 percent for registered Democrats and 29 percent for registered Republicans) hold the balance of power in American politics, understanding how to win them or even who they are and what they want is less clear.
In short, the best way to win back “independents” is this: Obama and the Dems need a little bit of patience, a lot of attention to pragmatic problem-solving, and the ability to resist the temptation to hunker down and move to the left.
But before getting to details of the political prescriptions, any discussion about the mood independents needs to begin with the observation that “independents” is a much more varied category than almost all pundits make it out to be. Many independents are actually shadow partisans, and a good number even see themselves are too far left or right for the two parties.
According to Gallup, only 43 percent of independents indentify themselves as “moderate,” while 35 percent say they are “conservative “and 18 percent say they are “liberal”. By comparison, 39 percent of Democrats and 24 percent of Republicans identify themselves as “moderate.” In other words, independents are hardly more “moderate” than Democrats.
In a recent survey, Pew broke independents down into five categories: “Shadow Republicans” (26 percent of independents); “Disaffected Republicans” (16 percent); “Shadow Democrats” (21 percent); “Doubting Democrats” (20 percent); and “Disengaged” (17 percent). As the names suggest, the shadow partisans vote somewhat predictably as partisans, while the Disaffected/Doubting class are slightly less reliably partisan, and the “Disengaged”, while most likely to be true independents, are also the least likely to vote – only 21 percent told Pew they were planning to vote this November.
So one way to think of independents is in terms of various degrees of independence. At the core are the true, true independents, who political scientists estimate to be about 10 percent of the electorate. These tend to be the most disaffected, disengaged voters, and lacking the ideological litmus tests of partisans, they also tend to be the most subject to the atmospherics and moods of how the country is doing and how even their own life is going rather than caring whether so-and-so voted the “right way” on some particular issue.
This probably goes a long way in explaining why they abandoned Democrats. Given the struggling economy, there is a desire to do something different, regardless of whether or not it makes sense – what Shankar Vedantam recently described as “action bias.” But it also means that they could turn just as quickly against Republicans, as they have in the past.
The lack of ideological attachment also suggests that while vague sloganeering against “big government” may make a good rallying cry, in all likelihood, few of these performance-based voters care all that passionately about the size of government. Rather, they are latching onto the most available explanation for the current sorry state of affairs. In their gut, they sense something is not working, but don’t have well-formed theories about what, exactly, it is that is not working. And, of course, they’d be hard-pressed to lay out exactly what they’d cut. They are not ideological crusaders. They are just generally cranky.
Expanding to the weak partisans – the so-called “Disaffected Republicans” and “Doubting Dems” – widens the category to bring in both the Republicans who probably dropped from the GOP column in 2006 and 2008 and either voted Dem or stayed home, and the Dems who are presumably crossing over or staying home this time (only 23 percent of the so-called “Doubting Democrats” told Pew that Obama’s policies have made economic conditions better, as compared to 50 percent for partisan or shadow Democrats). The weak partisans are more cynical and more anti-politician than their shadow partisan counterparts, and are accordingly probably more susceptible to the “throw the bums out” mood than their shadow partisans, who maintain a more interest in candidate positions and ideology.
Obviously, there is a mood of unusual restlessness in this country. This election marks the first time in almost 60 years that THREE consecutive elections resulted in House pick-ups of 20 or more seats for one party or the other (Dems picked up 31 seats in 2006, and 21 in 2008). One has to go back to 1952, when Republicans picked up 22 seats, marking the then-fifth consecutive House election of 20+ seat swings.
It’s also worth noting that 74 percent of independents now support the idea of a third party, up from 56 percent in 2003, and almost two-thirds (64 percent) of independents think that, “both parties care more about special interests than average Americans.” (Of course, it’s not just independents who want a third party – it’s also 47 percent of registered Republicans and 45 percent of registered Democrats, and overall, 58 percent of Americans who feel the two-party system is not providing adequate representation.)
So how can Democrats win back and re-mobilize these perpetually disaffected and disengaged types who broke for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008, and then either turned Republican in 2010 or just stayed home?
Partially, they just have to be patient and mature, since two big things are likely to happen in the next two years that will benefit them:
The economy is likely to improve, and Obama and the Dems should be able to take credit for this if they manage their communications strategy correctly, which will help with the performance-based calculus of these voters.
Republicans are likely to over-reach politically and spend too much time blocking administration initiatives, and holding investigations that lead nowhere. This may play well with the base, but it is unlikely to impress the non-ideological independents who are more interested in whether something is being done to help them pay their mortgage or get a job. If Obama and the Dems can offer a problem-solving oriented contrast to the ideological rampage of angry Republicans, they will benefit from looking like the adults in the room, just as they did in the 2008 election.
Will this be enough by itself to win back the sliver of disaffected independents who hold the keys to the balance of power? Maybe so, but maybe not.
To the extent that Obama and the Democrats want to win back the lost independents, they need to do their best to show them that they are reasonable, interested in making government work, and capable of making government work.
There will be great pressure, no doubt, from those who want Obama to draw a clear distinction with Republicans by pushing a more clearly left agenda. While this may excite the 20 percent or so of the electorate who are true liberals, it will all but ensure the kind of partisan gridlock that makes disaffected independents disaffected in the first place, further turning them off from politics (and making base voters even more important, which would be stupid, since the Republican base is bigger).
These swing independents don’t care much about ideology. They don’t pay attention to it, and they don’t vote on it. They care whether things are getting better and whether the folks in Washington look like they are trying to make things work.
There are plenty of sensible, centrist initiatives on important issues like energy, education, taxes, and infrastructure that we at PPI will be exploring over the next several months. We believe these solutions are both good policies and good politics for the same reason – because they are moderate approaches that can work, and in the process show some enough of the disaffected, non-ideological independents that Democrats are the party who is actually serious about governing.
The Republicans’ midterm triumph obviously is a demoralizing blow to President Obama, but it’s also a second chance. Unlike the scores of Democratic lawmakers who lost their seats, he has an opportunity to win back voters in the volatile center whose oscillations are keeping both parties on a short political leash.
How? By reclaiming the “postpartisan” reformer mantle that appealed so powerfully to these voters during his 2008 presidential campaign, and by crafting a more compelling plan to unleash U.S. economic dynamism.
Lest we forget, Obama ran as an outsider who promised to confront the dysfunctional political culture of Washington. While he’s redeemed other key campaign pledges, like ending torture, winding down the Iraq war, and passing comprehensive health care reform, he’s done little to change the way Washington works.
While independents overwhelmingly (by 15 points) backed Republicans, exit polls suggest they didn’t vote for the Tea Party’s radically libertarian philosophy, or for more political gridlock. In fact, they are defined in large part by their hostility to polarization and strident partisanship in Washington, and by their preference for performance over ideology.
Obama can begin to reestablish his standing with these voters by proposing structural fixes to our broken political system. And he can put the anti-government party on the spot by challenging Republicans to join him in reforming, rather than disabling, government.
Don’t mistake this for the familiar argument that Obama should “return to the center.” His challenge is not to reposition himself ideologically, it’s to break an ideological and partisan deadlock that’s paralyzing our government. For example, Obama could press for the federal clean elections law championed by Sen. Dick Durban that would finance Congressional campaigns with small donations matched by public contributions. He could try to work out a deal with Republicans to limit filibusters, which may now become a weapon in the hands of Senate Democrats (after all, he still has the veto). Or he could propose a lifetime ban on lobbying by ex-Members of Congress and their staffs.
And yes, fixing a broken political system entails working harder to find common ground with Republicans and restoring a civil tone in Washington, as Obama promised today in his post-election press conference today. With Republicans firmly in control of the House of Representatives, he doesn’t have any choice but to search for consensus and compromise – not unless he wants to put his presidency on hold for the next two years.
The flip side, of course, is that House Republicans can no longer claim powerlessness as an excuse for indulging in a politics of pure obstructionism. It’s doubtful they’ll be able to get away with serving up the usual ideological platitudes about limited government and fiscal probity. Now they’ll either have to share responsibility for governing with Obama, or come up with their own ideas for solving the nation’s urgent problems.
That could get ugly, at least at first. Fresh off their big victory, Republicans seem to be brimming with Tea Party hubris. Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner vowed this morning to make repealing “Obamacare” a top priority when the next Congress convenes in January. It’s tempting to say “bring it on,” because this would be a monumental mistake, an ideological overreach akin to Newt Gingrich’s attempts to shut down the federal government after the 1994 midterm. It would embroil the country again in another deeply divisive cage-match over health care reform, even as independents are yelling “focus on the economy” at the top of their lungs.
By developing a new blueprint to spur economic innovation and entrepreneurship, Obama can seize the political initiative, force Republicans to react to him, and quite possibly highlight significant fissures in GOP ranks. On deficit reduction, tax cuts, education, and immigration reform, Obama faces a similar challenge: bring the debate down from the GOP’s ideological nebulae to the concrete policy choices facing the country. He needs to keep pressure on the anti-government party to govern.
In the coming duel with House Republicans, Obama holds many high cards. He commands the bully pulpit, and with it, the opportunity to set the political agenda. He can use the veto to temper and force changes in GOP initiatives, as Bill Clinton did in vetoing welfare reform twice before getting a more progressive version. And if they won’t even come out to play, Obama can run against a “do-nothing” Congress just as Harry Truman did in 1948.
As many former presidents could attest, political life is full of second acts. President Obama’s is just beginning.
The Republican Party’s midterm sweep sets up a titanic test of wills between President Obama and the new GOP House majority. In the coming showdown, President Obama will enjoy at least four advantages.
The punditocracy apparently cannot resist the tendency to personalize political trends and developments. It has turned the midterm election into a political melodrama starring Barack Obama as the redeemer-President who inspired such soaring hopes in 2008, yet unaccountably failed to transform America in his first two years.
The saga of Obama agonistes may be more interesting, but public angst about the economy is what is really driving today’s election.
Sure, the president’s approval ratings are down (though not as low as Ronald Reagan’s or Bill Clinton’s at the same juncture). The public believes that the administration’s policies have failed to revive the economy, even while plunging the nation deeper in debt and, in the case of health care, expanding government’s reach.
But if unemployment were, at say, seven percent and trending downward, voters probably would see things in a more optimistic light. What’s oppressing the electorate is not the specter of big government, it’s the hangover from the 2007-2009 economic crisis, the worst to hit America since the Great Depression.
It’s not just lingering unemployment (9.6 percent). Americans lost roughly $11 trillion in net worth in those years, including about $4 trillion in home equity. Though stock prices rebounded somewhat, foreclosures continue apace and sales of new homes are at a 50-year low. Hammered by this “negative wealth effect,” U.S. households are shedding debt instead of spending, which depresses economic demand.
Our big banks still carry hundreds of billions of troubled loans on their books, and small businesses still have difficulty getting loans. U.S. businesses are keeping payrolls lean to cut costs, while sitting on nearly $2 trillion in retained earnings.
The federal government, meanwhile, seems to have exhausted the usual countercyclical remedies. With the national debt swelling rapidly, there’s little appetite in Washington for another dollop of stimulative spending (and will be even less if Republicans take over the House). The Federal Reserve says it’s ready for another round of “quantitative easing” – aka, printing money – but interest rates are already near zero.
The truth is, an economic downturn triggered by a financial crisis is much deeper and prolonged than an ordinary recession. No wonder voters are in a sour mood. They are lashing out at the party in power because the real culprits – the Republicans who were asleep at the switch as the housing and financial bubbles formed – aren’t around anymore to catch the blame. That’s not fair, but politics seldom is.
And while conventional wisdom pillories Obama for pushing health care or financial regulatory reform rather than spending every waking hour focusing obsessively on jobs, it’s not clear that would have made much of a difference.
The supposedly awesome powers of the presidency don’t include any magic levers for creating private sector jobs or dramatically speeding up recovery. In 1982, unemployment was even higher – 10.4 percent – on Election Day. Rather than promise instant relief, Reagan said the pain was necessary to wring inflation out of the economy and lay a stronger foundation for future growth. He urged Americans to “stay the course” and ride out the downturn. Republicans lost 26 House seats that year, but the economy eventually sprang back to life and propelled Reagan to a thumping reelection.
So Obama is right to stay calm, rather than running around the country trying to do something that doesn’t come naturally to him – emoting and feeling peoples’ pain. Instead, he should be crafting a new and more compelling economic narrative focused on unleashing American entrepreneurship and innovation. Forget Paul Krugman; Obama’s challenge is not to press for more stimulus or whine about economic inequality or posture as an anti-business populist, it’s to propose structural changes that will assure a broader, more robust economic recovery. These include an infrastructure bank, a new clean energy roadmap, pro-growth regulatory and tax reform (including corporate taxes), and a credible plan to restore fiscal stability once the economy regains strength.
Such a plan also is the best way to assure Democrats’ political recovery from the drubbing they will take today.
Political handicappers are so intent on trying to quantify Democratic losses in the midterm elections that they are missing the bigger picture: America’s radical center seems to be in a permanent state of revolt.
Democrats are going to get thrashed tomorrow, just as Republicans incurred huge losses in 2006 and 2008. The 2010 midterm will likely be the third successive election in which voters – or, more precisely, independent voters – rejected the ruling party. Grasping the significance of this meta-trend is more important that toting up the partisan body count.
Volatility across the broad center of the U.S. electorate has made this the age of the fleeting governing majority. Bill Clinton and the Democrats had one briefly from 1992-1994. Then George W. Bush and the Republicans held undivided power for six years before losing it in 2006.
“That’s never happened before in back-to-back administrations,” notes pollster Scott Rasmussen. The likely return to divided government signals, as Sarah Palin might put it, public “refudiation” of both political parties.
It’s no accident that this trend coincides with the “great sorting out,” the tendency of both parties to gravitate toward their respective ideological poles. This has left a large, discontented body of voters that increasingly feels disenfranchised by the two-party system. More Americans (37 percent) now identify as independents than as Democrats or Republicans.
Of course, independents are a diverse lot. The Pew Research Center, for example, breaks them down into categories (“shadow Republicans” and “doubting Democrats”) that suggest that a significant portion of them have residual partisan leanings. They’ve also grown more conservative since 2006, perhaps owing to GOP defections, and more skeptical of government’s ability to solve big problems.
Compared to core conservatives and liberals, however, independents are generally pragmatic and moderate in outlook, and almost by definition are alienated from the hyper-partisan, zero-sum game of politics as played in Washington. Above all, says Andy Kohut of the Pew Center, they put performance before ideology. They will vote against incumbents not out of a basic philosophical affinity with the Republicans, but because they believe Democratic policies have failed to spur jobs and economic growth.
In 2006, independents gave Democrats a 17-point margin, and control of Congress. Obama carried independents by 8 points in 2008, enough to give him the biggest majority won by a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson. Their defection from the progressive coalition over the past two years is the main reason Democrats are facing a beat-down tomorrow.
The silver lining for progressives in the midterm is that these swing voters could swing back their way over the next two years. According to a recent National Journal poll, independents still harbor reasonably warm feelings about President Obama. The key to winning them back is not to be more liberal or more moderate, it’s to govern effectively from the pragmatic center. That means building bipartisan support for tackling the nation’s most urgent problems: stalled job growth, eroding competitiveness, a massive overhang of debt, not to mention a careful winding down our overseas military engagements.
But if Obama and House Republicans can’t find a way to make forward progress on these fronts, the radical center will only become more disenchanted with the two-party duopoly. In that case, watch for a serious push to weld non-aligned and moderate voters into a “third force” in U.S. politics.
Imagine you are taking a shower. The water is too cold, so you turn it a little to the hot side. But hot turns out to be too hot, so you turn it a little to the cold side. But then cold turns out to be too cold. So you turn it back a little to the hot side, only for it to be too hot again. But no matter how you adjust, you can’t seem to find that nice comfortable middle temperature.
That seems to be about the dilemma a majority American people face with regard to their representatives in Congress. According to a new analysis of voters and their members of Congress, an estimated 90 percent of voters are less extreme than their elected representatives. Or put another way, only one in ten voters are more extreme then the folks representing them in Washington, DC.
But the problem is these 90 percent voters don’t have centrist candidates to choose from. Instead, they go from electing representatives who are too conservative for them, to electing representatives who are too liberal for them, to too conservative for them, every now and then trying to adjust, but always quite unsucessfully.
The authors of this analysis, Dartmouth political scientists Joseph Bafumi and Michael C. Herron, call this process “leapfrog representation” – since the median voter keeps getting leapfrogged when seats change parties. And what’s more compelling is that according to their analysis, even the median voter within each party is more moderate than the representatives. (If you want to know more about how they got these results, you can read a more detailed article I wrote about the study, or for the technically inclined, the authors’ academic version.)
One of the other neat things about this study was that the researchers were able to show that voters who also contribute to campaigns tend to be more extreme than those who don’t. Though they don’t have the data to prove this for sure, it does suggest that money may be doing some of the work of driving extremism. If you assume that money is important (a pretty safe assumption), it makes sense that candidates who appeal to extremes can raise more money, which helps them greatly at the early stages of a campaign when money is probably most important.
All of this, of course, makes for pretty depressing reading. It suggests that we are in a period of “leapfrog politics,” in which the moderate, middle-of-the-road voters who make up the majority of the electorate are going to keep switching from too liberal to too conservative, never quite able to find that happy medium ground (like the poor shower-taker switching from too hot to too cold). But it is a helpful way of understanding what’s going on, and a quite powerful analysis.
On Wednesday, November 17, the Progressive Policy Institute hosted a lively discussion on how Obama and the Democrats could win back independents, who broke so strongly for Republicans in 2010 after breaking solidly for Democrats in 2006 and 2008.
Here’s how Bill Kristol, Fox News contributor and editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, summed up 
Yesterday, the 
The punditocracy apparently cannot resist the tendency to personalize political trends and developments. It has turned the midterm election into a political melodrama starring Barack Obama as the redeemer-President who inspired such soaring hopes in 2008, yet unaccountably failed to transform America in his first two years.
