Democrats Who Move Right Lose Elections – There Is No “Center”

[markpkessinger]

78. Here's a blogpost I wrore in December 2010 on this subject . . .

. . . on OpenSalon.com:

The Mythical Independent “Middle”

Marist College has released the results of a poll conducted from Dec. 2 through Wed. Dec. 8, the day the President announced his initial deal with the GOP on the Bush tax cuts, indicating that the President's approval rating has slipped still further. The deal with the GOP was, of course, exactly what most of the Beltway political pundits had been saying he needed to do following the results of the mid-term elections: move more to the right (the pundits calling moving to the center — more on that in a moment). This, they said, was how he could win back independent voters.

Well, folks, guess which group's approval of the President remained virtually unchanged as a result of his rightward capitulation: that's right, INDEPENDENTS. The ratings among independents were 39% favorable and 52% unfavorable. A month ago, the same group's ratings of the President were 38% and 54%, respectively. On the other hand, his favorable rating among Democrats dropped nine percentage points, from 83% to 74%, and among liberals from 78% to 69%, while his unfavorable rating among Democrats nearly doubled from 11% to 21%, and among liberals from 14% to 22%.

The fact that the President has realized no sudden boost of support among independents following his “move to the center” on the tax cut deal ought to (but probably won't) permanently put to rest the the notion being perpetuated by the D.C. punditry that the midterms were a vote “against the President's liberal policies.” Independents are not a cohesive political group; they are all over the map, with some of them more liberal than most democrats and some more conservative than some of the hardest right GOP legislators. Many of them are not even consistently “left-leaning” or “right-leaning,” but in fact lean different ways on different issues. Independents are simply unaffiliated with either of the two parties, for reasons which vary from person to person. Some are independent simply because they've never registered as members of a party. Others are unaffiliated because they lack confidence in either party. Thus, the suggestion that the President will win over disaffected independents simply by aiming for the midpoint between the current Democratic and Republican party positions on any given issue is absurd on its face. Senate and House Democrats now occupy what has historically been the center position in the American political spectrum, and the GOP has gone off a rightward cliff. So the President, by aiming for a mythical midpoint, succeeds no only in offending his core constituency, but by arriving at a place that is, in fact, pretty far to the right, he likewise fails to gain credibility with many independents.

Nevertheless, so much of the media continues to speak of independents as if they are a cohesive constituency whose preferences lie between Democrats and the GOP. Part of this, I think, may be a function of the one-dimensional, left-right visual metaphor we use to describe the range of political ideas in this country. In reality, political ideas are probably better plotted in three-dimensional space rather than along a uni-dimensional left-right axis. So I think we too often allow the left-right visual metaphor drive our thinking about the relationships of various ideological positions relative to one another, and thus find ourselves with no place left along our one-dimensional line in which to place independent voters except in the middle, between the two parties. But it simply is not a reflection of reality.

The message for the President in all this should be that if he were to actually feed, water, give adequate sunshine and talk nicely to the progressive constituency, and fight for progressive values, he would, in fact, bring a long a good number of those independents (not all of them certainly, but I bet it would be enough).

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/12/10/105105/poll-obama...