Back in June, the Pew Center for People and the Press released a poll that asked voters to place both themselves and the political parties on a scale of very liberal to very conservative. I picked this chart up again over the weekend, and stared at it for a while. Amidst the constant up and down of polling, I haven’t seen anything that better lays out the challenges that Democrats face both in the upcoming election and for the foreseeable future, so I think it’s worth re-visiting.
At first, this chart seems puzzling. While there is remarkable consistency in where ALL voters place both Republicans and the Tea Party movement, there is a remarkable gap in how Republicans and Democrats differentially view Democrats’ ideology. (Independents come down in the middle, but since many independents tend to be closet partisans, the result makes sense as the average of the two.)
Why should this be the case? Why do Democrats and Republicans perceive the Republican Party about the same, but the Democratic Party so differently? And why does it matter?
One explanation is that Republicans spend a lot more time and energy painting Democrats as too liberal than Democrats spend painting Republicans as too conservative. As a result, the average Republican voter thinks Democrats are far more liberal than they actually are, whereas the average Democrat sees less difference between Democrats and Republicans.
This would explain why Republicans are much more enthusiastic right now about voting. If Republican voters see a larger difference between the two parties than Democrat voters, they are likely to believe that much more is at stake. If they think more is at stake, they are more likely to vote.
The second explanation is that Democrats think that the policies they support are quite sensible and reasonable, and they have a hard time imagining how anybody could not agree with them. But the polling suggests that the Democrats’ policies might actually not be as moderate as many Democrats think they are, and the political center of gravity is a little bit further right than many Democrats would like to admit.
What this means that Democrats have their work cut out for them, both in the next two months and for the foreseeable future.
First, Democrats need to continue to make clear just how conservative the Republican Party has become, and therefore how much is at stake in these elections. Democratic leaders can’t take it for granted that average Democratic voters see a huge difference between the two parties since apparently, they do not. Certainly, Democrats are working hard to draw lines, but this polling suggests just how much work they have to do to make sure these lines stick.
Second, Democrats need to be much more careful in considering how their policies play. They need to understand that a lot of voters see them as much further to the left then they see themselves. They cannot simply assume that just because that they see their policies and positions as moderate that they are self-evidently so. Democrats also must be more aggressive in making the case that the moderate policies that they do propose are, in fact, moderate, since they are working against prevailing beliefs.
These are the challenges Democrats face, and these are the keys to whether they can maintain control in November and beyond: drawing clearer distinctions with Republicans, and recognizing that the political center of gravity may not be as far to the left as many Democrats instinctively think it is.