As the new Republican House majority settles in and tries to figure out exactly which issues and positions to take, a new poll from Gallup highlights just how difficult it will be to keep the coalition of swing independents, old-fashioned Republicans, and tea partiers together.

The problem, in short, is this: Both Republicans and Independents prefer Tea Party-backed Republicans to old-fashioned Republican leaders in Congress. But at the same time, by a 51-to-39 percent margin, Independents are concerned that Republicans will go too far in trying to reverse the Democrats’ policies. In other words, good luck, Speaker Boehner: If you aren’t aggressive enough, you will lose the mad-as-hell Tea Party voters. But if you are too aggressive, you will lose the majority of independents who are worried you are going too far. And you’ll need to please both to keep your majority.

As we know, Independents broke 56-to-38 percent for Republicans in the Mid-Term Election after breaking strongly for Democrats in the prior two elections, giving Republicans the keys to the House and tightening the balance in the Senate. Looking at the Independents’ preferences for who they say they want as the key policy player, we can see that those who voted Republican prefer Tea Party-backed Republicans by a 32-23 margin, an even more sizable balance than registered Republicans. (I’m admittedly interpolating here a bit, assuming (safely, I think) that those who voted Republican want Republicans to be in charge)

However, things get a little more complicated when we consider the next result of the poll: Independents, by a sizeable majority (51-to-39) are more worried that Republicans will go too far in reversing Democrats’ policies than that they will not go far enough.  In other words, the majority of Independents are not radicals, even if the plurality supports the Tea Party.

At first this seems like a bit of a puzzle. One possibility is that the except for the third of Independents who want the Tea Party to be in charge, almost all the rest are worried about Republicans going to far.

But here’s what I see as the more likely explanation: swing Independents are frustrated with the state of the economy, and see Washington politics-as-usual as a reasonable culprit. The Tea Party brand has tapped into that frustration. But swing Independents, who abandoned Republicans in 2006 and 2008, are not exactly running back to the Republican Party with open, loving arms. To them, the Tea Party taps into the “we don’t like either party, but we’re not happy, so we’ll vote out the incumbent” rationale.

As a recent Pew poll demonstrated, only 48 percent of respondents felt happy about the Republicans’ victory the day after the election, and only 41 percent of respondents approved of the Republican’s policies and plans for the future – significantly lower numbers than both 1994 Republican victory or the 2006 Democratic victory.

I see a mixed message from the angry swing vote: we’re mad as hell, but we’re also kind of moderate. We’re not happy with the way things are going, but we’re not sure we want a dramatic change either. We want to send a message, but we hope you don’t take that message too seriously.

Just as Democrats found these voters impossible to satisfy after winning their support in 2006/2008, my prediction is that Republicans will find them equally difficult to satisfy.  Once Republican leadership has to make choices and register votes, they will learn that you can’t please all the people all the time, and these days, it’s increasingly hard to even please some of the people, some of the time.

In the wake of the mid-term elections, it makes sense that those on the political right would try to claim that there has been a fundamental “right turn” among voters, just as many on the left claimed but two short years ago that there had been a fundamental “left turn” among voters.

Those on the right predictably have seized on the fact that now 42 percent of the U.S. population identifies as conservative, a 20-year high, and that conservatives in 2010 broke 86-14 percent for Republicans, a 30-year high.

Consider the Gallup political ideology poll, which shows an uptick in the number of self-identified conservatives in the electorate:

Over at The Democratic Strategist, Ed Kilgore and Ruy Teixeira have counter-argued that what we are seeing is not so much a shift to the right, but rather more Republicans and Republican leaners choosing to identify as “conservative” rather than moderate.  I think this is largely right, though not the whole story.

The Weekly Standard’s Jay Cost, however, has some problems with the Kilgore/Teixeira analysis:

If we follow Gallup, we’d draw two conclusions: (a) the increase in self-identified conservatives in the broader public has increased more than Teixeira and Kilgore acknowledge; (b) conservatives were not over-represented as a share of the electorate in 2010, but rather were under-represented in previous cycles.

Cost’s argument is slippery for a number of reasons. First, it’s not that Kilgore/Teixeira don’t acknowledge the increase in self-identified conservatives. It’s just that they ascribe it mostly to Republicans becoming more conservative, which, again, I think is probably the case.

Second, the claim that conservatives were under-represented in previous cycles seems to rely on an assumption that only now, in 2010, did many voters wake up to the fact that they indeed were conservative, after thinking for all these years that they were moderate. At last, perhaps thinks Cost, the fog has lifted!

A couple of additional considerations:

First, when you look at the balance of responses over 20 years, the balance is remarkably stable. Sure, it goes up and down, but “liberal” stays between 16 and 22 percent, conservative stays between 36 and 42 percent, and moderate (with the exception of its high point of 43 in 1992) stays between 35 and 40 percent. As Prof. James Stimson has shown (see here), the mood of the public goes back and forth between liberal and conservative. And power oscillates back and forth between the two parties in semi-predictable patterns

And there is good reason for this. The public is fundamentally moderate, and any time our winner-take-all system of elections produces a result that gets too far away from the moderate public, the electorate produces a response within a few cycles.

So, if there is a rightward shift, it’s probably only going to be a short blip, no more permanent than the supposed left turn of 2006-2008. Cost, to his credit, recognizes that the bump-up is more of a blip than a turning point. He also puts a good deal of hope (probably fairly placed) in the fact that Republicans will now be in charge of redistricting and Republican voters are better spread out while Democrats are more concentrated in urban districts

The second caveat is about the meaning of the word “conservative”

According to research by Chris Ellis and James Stimson, some people genuinely know what it means to a conservative in the current political debate, and indeed express matching preferences across all issues. But these “constrained conservatives” (as Ellis and Stimson call them) account for only 26 percent of all self-identified conservatives.

More common are the “moral conservatives” (34 percent), who think of themselves as conservative in terms of their own personal values, be they social or religious. And they are indeed right leaning on social, cultural, and religious issues. But they also like government spending on a variety of programs and generally approve of government interventions in the marketplace, hardly making them true conservatives.

And still others, “conflicted conservatives”  (30 percent), are not conservative at all on the issues. But they like identifying themselves as conservatives. To them, it somehow sounds better. Or at least, they like it better then their other choices in the traditional self-identification questionnaire: moderate and liberal.

A smaller group of self-identified “conservatives” (10 percent) could be classified as libertarian – conservative on economic issues, liberal on social issues.

In other words, just because people identify as conservatives doesn’t mean that they are actually true conservatives . There are numerous reasons why they might identify so. It has long been the case that that the American public, on average, is operationally liberal and symbolically conservative. That is, that when asked about specific “liberal” government programs – be they spending on education, environmental protections, regulation of business – the majority of voters consistently say they approve. But when asked to self-identify themselves as liberals, moderates, or conservatives, many of the same voters say they are “conservative.”

So here’s my guess, though we don’t have the data to prove it (yet): part of what appears to be a rightward shift is Republicans identifying more as conservatives and less as moderates, as Kilgore/Teixeira argue, and part of the shift is more people attaching themselves to the conservative label because they like the branding of conservative as sober and responsible, and at a time of growing deficits, like associating themselves with the brand.

The challenge for conservatives will be to resist interpretations  that assume America has made a rightward turn and is now (finally!) on the road to truly embracing real conservative values. It hasn’t. This election was far more a rejection of Democrats who failed to turn around the economy in short order and whose unified control of government made some moderate voters more uncomfortable than they expected in 2006 and 2008.

If I were a gambling man (and I’ve been known to make the occasional political bet), I would gamble that 42 percent marks a high-water mark for conservatives in the electorate. Simple reason: history shows that these things go up and down, and are pretty stable.

Finally, the demographics matter. According to a new study from Project Vote, turnout among key Democratic constituencies dropped off drastically between 2008 and 2010. Young voters, down 55 percent; African-Americans, down 43 percent. Hispanics down 40 percent. These groups, particularly young voters, and Hispanics, are the future of the electorate. When they come back and vote in 2012, it will be a whole different ballgame.

Brookings Institution congressional scholar Thomas Mann is hardly known as a partisan bomb-thrower. A frequent co-author of books and articles on Congress and American politics with the American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein, Mann is a model of sober and intelligent commentary, calling things as he sees them.

That reputation makes his recent comments on the state of our politics particularly noteworthy. In an interview with Time’s Jay Newton-Small, here’s what Mann had to say:

There is simply no basis for meaningful bipartisan leadership meetings today. Republicans are determined to defeat Obama in 2012; they have no interest in negotiating with him in order to provide him any sort of victory. This is a partisan war and the Republicans are playing to win. The only question is how long it will take Obama to accept this reality and act accordingly.

To hear, say, bloggers vent this way would be expected; to hear Mann, a scholar ensconced in the establishment, speak so plainly underscores the enormity of the problem. Our politics is broken and Mann, correctly, identifies Republican cynicism as its primary cause. Today’s GOP has become slave to the Rush Limbaughs, Glenn Becks, and Sarah Palins. Where are the Olympia Snowes, the Susan Collinses, the George Voinoviches? Why aren’t they banding together with the moderates and liberals on the other side of the aisle to demand a restoration of reasonable discourse? Are the imperatives of electoral politics so strong as to short-circuit any attempt at good-faith governance? (The question, perhaps, answers itself.)

In a follow-up exchange with Greg Sargent, Mann offered a more specific vision of what Obama should do:

With no expectations of passing important new legislation or of garnering anything from Republicans in Congress but political bait, he should pursue his substantive agenda where he can act on his own and use Congress as a place to submit a genuinely serious set of proposals to deal with the country’s more serious challenges (with no expectation that any will pass) and couple them with high visibility straight talk to the American people about the course he is proposing.

If the last two years are any indication, the next two will bring only further distress and disappointment for that vanishing few in Washington who still believe in that old dream of deliberative democracy. But gridlock need not be inaction, and Mann’s advice is spot-on. For the President to regain control of his presidency, he needs to engage in that thing he seems to have been averse to thus far: politics. Use the bully pulpit. Engage in a bit of gamesmanship. Promote his vision of the good society – and make explicit why the conservative vision is the wrong one for the country. Shifting the dynamic between a feral House and a technocratic White House is one of two prerequisites (the other being an improved economy) if we are to preserve any hope of advancing progressive priorities in the time that remains in his first term.

Book Review: The Disappearing Center, By Alan Abramowitz

That our politics are now deeply polarized is a well-known fact. But do the polarized politics in Washington reflect the deep divides in the country between red and blue voters (and their respective desires for increasingly opposite policies on both sides)? Or do these elite divisions exist in spite of an essentially purple, moderate America?

Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University, is on the side of Washington as mirror of a deeply fractured electorate rapidly losing its political middle. His new book, “The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy” is the story of how voters migrated to the extremes over the last five decades.

Essentially, four big, interlinked things happened. The first is that the parties “sorted” better. The second is that the number of safe districts and safe states increased. The third is that Americans as a whole became more educated. The fourth is that the engagement gap between strong partisans and political moderates widened.

In their 1960 plumage, Republicans and Democrats were both diverse species, loose-fitting labels that meant very different things depending on where you were from. Northern “liberal” Republicans and Southern “conservative” Democrats made up large minority factions, and both often found more common cause with their fellow “liberals” or “conservatives” across the aisle than their fellow partisans. In such an environment, bipartisanship was the norm, rather than the exception.

Then the tumultuous ‘60s shook the snow globe of American politics. The fight over civil rights broke the Democrats’ hold on the “Solid South,” turning Southern Democrats into Republicans. The Republican center of gravity gradually migrated deep below the Mason-Dixon line, taking on a much redder hue: much more socially conservative, more skeptical of government. Democrats, meanwhile, freed from the need to keep placate the conservative southerners, grew bluer: more socially liberal, and less skeptical of government.

Once upon a time, congressional districts were highly competitive, and a Democrat (or Republican) had to be sensitive to the concerns of voters in the competing party to maintain a seat. Even as late as the 95^th Congress (1977-1978), only 24 percent of Democrats and 27 percent of Republicans were in “safe” districts; By the 108^th Congress (2004-2005), 49 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans were in “safe” districts. The consequence: they were far more likely to be worried about fending off extreme challengers in their primaries than about winning the general election by moving to the center. Thus, more extreme politicians replaced more moderate ones.

In 1976, the eight most populous states were all battleground states in the presidential election, and the average winning margin among them was 3.1 percentage points. In 2004, only four of the eight most populous states were battlegrounds, and the average winning margin in the eight states was 9.3 percentage points. Thanks to both realignment and demographic change, Abramowitz writes, “Red states, counties, and congressional districts have been getting redder while blue states, counties, and congressional districts have been getting bluer.”

At the same time, the American public got a whole lot better educated. In 1956, 37 percent of Americans had only a grade school education, and just 19 percent had some college; in 2004, only three percent of Americans had just a grade school education, and 61 percent had at least some college.

This matters, Abramowitz argues, because “College-educated citizens are generally more interested in politics, more politically active, and better informed about candidates and issues than high school-educated citizens. This is especially true with regard to one important form of political engagement: ideological awareness.”

So: the parties got better sorted into distinct camps, districts became less competitive, and an increasingly educated electorate was better able to pick up on the differences and to respond accordingly, sorting themselves likewise into the appropriate categories. Abramowitz notes that especially among the better educated, there has been increased “partisan-ideological polarization” – that is, that high-information liberals are indeed reliably liberal across all issues, and high-information conservatives are reliably conservative across all issues.

All of this polarization has actually been good for political engagement generally. Abramowitz cites numerous measures of a public that now cares more about politics, follows it more closely, and talks about it more to their friends – partly because they are more educated, and partly because if the parties are highly polarized, the stakes of political victory are significantly greater (high stakes are a terrific motivator.)

But, at the same time, a certain slice of the electorate has been left behind: “The American public appears to be increasingly divided into two groups,” writes Abramowitz, “the politically engaged, who view politics in ideological terms, and the politically disengaged, who do not.”

For example, 56 percent of strong liberal or conservatives reported being politically engaged in 2004, as compared to 36 percent of those who “lean” liberal or conservative, and just 20 percent of those who say they are moderate, or of no ideology.  In the 1950s, this gap did not exist.

To Abramowitz, the story of the disengaged moderates is mostly a story about less-educated, less-engaged citizens who don’t know or care enough about politics to pick a side. Were they to get wealthy and educated, like the partisans, they would presumably then know enough to pick one of the two distinct teams in American politics. But lacking the means or the will to pick a side, they call themselves moderate, feel disengaged and disenchanted by politics, and try to get on with the business of making a living.

On the descriptives, The Disappearing Center is a terrific compendium to what’s happened. The parties have pulled apart, and in particular strong partisans on both sides are further apart than ever before. There are fewer competitive states, fewer competitive districts, and politicians who dare to compromise are increasingly punished.  Nor is this likely to change: “A coalition of moderates is no longer possible because the center is a shrunken remnant of what it was forty or fifty years ago,” concludes Abramowitz. The forecast is for more partisan rancor, far as the eye can see.

But the analysis lacks in a few areas. For one, Abramowitz doesn’t engage with the possibility that political moderates have become less engaged out of frustration with extremism; his preferred explanation is that they remain moderate only out of an ignorance of the stakes involved. More frustratingly, his analysis is based heavily on reported self-identifications, rather than actual issue positions, and the issues he choose to measure polarization tend to be particular hot-button issues, like abortion and the Iraq war. More thorough issue-based measuring of public opinion (see, for example, Morris Fiorina’s Disconnect, or Joseph Bafumi and Michael C. Herron’s research on leapfrog representation) has found a much more moderate public on the issues, a public that has been left behind by two increasingly extreme parties.

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. Herron have 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.

Photo credit: Shreyans Bhansali

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.

Photo credit: Leol 30

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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.