If the 63-seat House swing in 2010 — accompanied by the rise of the Tea Party and the obliteration of the Blue Dog/Lindsay Graham contingent — didn’t already make this abundantly clear, party affiliation or independent status is not sufficient information to capture the leanings of the electorate. Gallup has found that a record 40 percent of Americans identify as independents, which is interesting, but we can’t and shouldn’t draw responsible conclusions based on this data alone.
The $63 trillion in unfunded entitlement programs in the room? Whether the independents consider themselves to the left or right of either party, and Gallup’s follow-up “lean Democratic/lean Republican” question is still insufficient as a useful figure. Without clarification, Mitt and the GOP will never stop upholding “appeal to the center” as the all-important approach for the general, though this may be a useful tactic for the Democratic nominee.
What chunk of the electorate is “independent/right of GOP”? I wager this group comprises the majority of independents, a large enough group that “Republican” plus ”independent/right of GOP” gets you to 51 percent.
“Independent/center”, or perhaps “independent/leans Democratic from the right” and “independent/leans GOP from the left”, is game-changer data which would require that media put a more accurate face on the electorate. And “independent/leans Democrat from the left” would be a useful figure for alerting Dem leadership of just how small Obama’s base is.
Marginally useful figures like “40 percent – independent” are why Rove and Carville still get to work in Washington. Better numbers trump “expert” opinion.
Why don’t we have these figures?
I don’t know what “right of GOP” means. A large swath of the independents and Tea Partiers lean libertarian. The left/right dichotomy isn’t useful.
Actually in this case it is useful in that someone “to the right” of the Republicans is not likely to vote for a Republican pandering to the left of center hoping for votes.
Count me in that bucket, I am to the right of McCain / Brown / Boehner / McConnell and in alignment with Rubio, Mike Lee, Louis Gomez. I see the Democrats as the party of Michael Moore and Code Pink. The GOP leadership is so weak, I don’t think they truly understand the ideology we are facing. They are too worried about what the liberal press will say about them and no matter what it is, they will be bashed so put on your big boy pants and do what is best for the country…cut spending.
Craft a simple message to do away with baseline budgeting, as the starting point…no family has an automatic increase of 8% in our budgets, Americans can understand that, they will be shocked to learn that the stimulus spending is embedded in the baseline, expose it and hammer that point hard, it’s really not that difficult you just need the right people (Paul Ryan) in front of the camera every day.
I am amazed how the GOP listens to political consultants who consistently get it wrong. Do something different, listen to the commoners and do some basic math (x-y=cuts).
Of course it isn’t a catch-all — an option for those who do not think in those terms would need to be included.
However, the vast majority does think in terms of left/right, though they differ on the definition of left and right. A majority of non-conservatives hold that moving right implies approaching fascism, a terrible fallacy. But for the sake of polling, what matters is not that they are correct, simply what they believe.
The really sad thing about the “Independents” is that they are swayed by things those of us on the right would call absurd. “He was so mean during the debates”, “He hunts and kills animals for sport”, “He has a religion that I am afraid of”. The list that I have read on this topic is so long and so trivial that it is mind blowing. These are the voters that the Romney’s and Huntsman’s are shooting, (Bad choice of words), for. One of the big responses to the standoff between Obama and Congress causes this group to say “Why can’t they just compromise”! They have no deep understanding of how corrupt Obama and the Demorats are. One cannot compromise between life and death!
In other words, there are large numbers of Americans who are so abysmally ignorant of both the process and the issues that they should not be voting at all.
Interestingly enough, a different part of Gallup (the part that sells employee testing/training to corporations) has a test methodology that would seem relevant to providing this extra level of differentiation.
Rather than asking the typical stand-alone questions, they pair opposing traits and ask you to rate yourself (strongly/moderately/neutral) between the two on first impression (you only had 15 seconds to answer per pair). They one I took had ~50 sets, but I don’t think you’d need more than 5-10 to get the appropriate differentiation in the political realm. When I initially took it, I thought it was just another HR boondoggle, but was actually quite impressed at how accurate the results were.
Many of the people I know who consider themselves *Republicans* do so reluctantly because they are irritated by the posturing on social issues that Republicans do. Picking fights about homosexuality and the like distracts from the necessary work: shrinking the role of government and balancing the budget.
Frankly if the Democrats started doing that (not that I expect them to), I’d change my party affiliation. As for right now, the Republicans are the only people even paying lip service to the idea, but they’d better start doing more than talking about it.
I hope you’ve noticed that the left are the ones who pick fights over homosexuality, not the right.
And race. Only racists who think in terms of race, and the left are the ones who always bring it up. Just sayin’…
Of course we can and should draw responsible conclusions from that.
We have seen the effects repeatedly in the past, but neither party ever wants to take responsibility for invoking it against themselves.
The reality is that we have two basic issue groups, fiscal and social, that are considered as “liberal” or “conservative”, and the majority of people are not the same on both.
Further, each of those issue groups has multiple sub-groups that people do not conveniently line up as purely “liberal” or purely “conservative” on.
Because the Republicans and Democrats both keep insisting on greater and greater levels of ideological purity, they are time and again surprised when the people who are not fully with their programs flip to the other party. Worse, they never want to acknowledge that most of those flips are not voting for the other hardline party ideology, but merely voting against their hardline party ideology.
Even your question shows that bias.
Sure, there are many people who are more fiscally “conservative” than the Republicans. Are they also as socially “conservative”? If not, why should they be assumed to vote for the Republicans?
What about the people who are more socially “conservative” than the Republicans? Are you sure they are also as fiscally “conservative”? It is obvious that way too many are not, so again why assume they will vote Republican?
As long as people insist on believing that anyone who does not fully disagree with them must fully agree with them, then they will regularly wonder why they cannot effect a long term shift in government.
You are dead-on, Sam, in arguing that ideological purity just as often chases away moderates in their own party as it does attract moderates. The ideological puritan is a monist (“purity” and “perfection” are forever monist thinking), which reflects the one-way, only-way rigidity that moderates and independents find to be so life-extinguishing. Moderates flee their own party, driven away by the extremists in their party. They return when the extremists in the other party are even worse.
In Ameriican politics, the independents and moderates are now the largest political party, as D’s and R’s hemorrage voters. Without their own party, the centrists merely ping-pong back and forth fleeing ideological extremist rigidity, holding their nose on Election Day while voting for the lesser of two unattractive options.
Gallup will never find these voters in its polling so long as they continue to poll along a Left-Right divide, because the independents are SIMULTANEOUSLY center-Left and center-Right, which is to say, they are pluralist, not monist, and they are open-minded, not closed-minded, and they are repelled by ideology based upon myths, not facts.
To quote some famous guy, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”. I’ll bend back and forth and both at once on many issues…but there are a select few I WILL NOT bend on. Right now the head of my personal hit parade is the budget. The deficit does not need to be “reduced”. It needs to be REVERSED, preferably by the day before yesterday. The second amendment MUST stay in place and be defended vigorously (luckily there have been some positive developments in that direction, without the “wild west shootouts” predicted by 2nd amendment opponents). I’m not sure where it should start, but the reach/scope of the federal government MUST be reversed. We are already in a place where people of 75 years ago would reckon us to be living under tyranny. I know a person who wanted to have a huge colony (hundreds) of bats in his attic exterminated and couldn’t because they were some sort of protected species. They could have them caged and transplanted outside of town…but not for several months as it was their mating season. The feds tied them up really good on that one. Couldn’t move out, couldn’t sell the house, couldn’t make it liveable (the house smelled horribly).
Things like “gay rights” are meaningless if our government dissolves. I’m very much against unfettered “abortion rights”, but I’ll compromise on it in the interest of saving the country. Since defense is one of the very few things the feds do that is provided for in the constitution, I don’t like to see it cut, but on the other hand do we really need bases in over 100 countries? Seems like maybe a dozen or 15 would provide almost as good coverage given modern technology.
But basically, everybody needs to understand that defense, SS and medicare/medicaid WILL be cut…either soon on our terms or later either on someone else’s terms or because there just is not money.
I wonder how many of the independents were tea party affiliated?
My guess is many identify with liberty and small government at least much smaller government than we have now. I know I met many independents at various conservative events. ObamaCare and the Stimulus Bill is what brought many people together, we see what is happening in Europe, the debt to GDP ratio is beyond scary and it will only get worse, we are really much closer to Greece than people realize…if only the media told the truth and our education system taught the truth about socialism, there is no utopia.
After several electoral cycles of volunteering and contributing, I left the GOP in 2010 for three reasons:
1. the GOP is too accommodating of the left on homosexual behaviors;
2. the GOP is too accommodating of the left on euthanasia (from conception onward);
3. the GOP is not sufficiently serious about reducing taxation, spending and over-regulation of the economy.
If they get serious on two of the three without getting worse on the other, I’ll reconsider.
In crafting a new political party to contest the duopoly, a group of philosophers in the high Sierra in 2011 analyzed a decade of polling by Gallup, Zogby, and Pew. They wanted the answer to the question asked here: Just WHO is the moderate, independent voter? How do you identify the conservative Democrat or liberal Republican from voter lists? How does one discern the bi-partisan from the non-partisan? All of their questions, they suddenly realized, reflected the traditional left-right ideological divide, as if the ‘center’ of the American electorate is a monolith that the two major parties divide under their ‘big tent’ approach, in order to win the general elections.
What if the ‘center’ is not a monolith, divided between the two major parties on Election Day? What if, instead, the ‘center’ in American politics is genuinely pluralist? If the center is genuinely pluralist, then the duopoly is ripe for collapse. At least, this was the reasoning of the philosophers.
Is their reasoning sound? Is the American political center actually pluralist, not monolithic? If they are correct then the entire center is up for grabs for any group which can articulate centrist concerns and offer a dramatic contrast from the established duopoly. And one all-important ingredient: the new party will have to offer a simple method of uniting the divergent pluralism in such a manner that it offers great appeal to millions of voters in both major parties.
The new party is a very interesting answer to this post’s observation: What is it that Gallup is missing in its polling data? What Gallup and Zogby and Pew have missed is the very real possibility that the center is actually plural, center-Rights joining center-Lefts, bi-partisans joining non-partisans, independents joining moderates, and so the center remains “hidden” in the long-accepted polling of an ideological dualism, the Left-Right divide.
In Nash’s mathematical theories, the introduction of a third viable alternative to any duopoly results in the collapse of one or both of the duopoly. See you on the next five Election Days, for proof.
inspectorudy, I think that is more true of “moderates” than independents. Independents do include people with fickle and easily manipulated views about politics, but the category also includes a large people with strong convictions that don’t neatly fit with either political party.
I’ve wondered about this sort of this, and spoken about what I think on it, for some time, and I think it showed itself particularly well in the 2004 election cycle.
The media (cheerleading for Kerry, of course) kept harping on how low Bush’s approval was, but then they were mystified that Kerry wasn’t picking up most of that… Well, that’s easy! A HUGH number of people thought Bush was being WAY too far left, so OF COURSE they thought Kerry was worse. It was almost comical.
The problem is that, in any two-party system (as ours inherently is – the “first person with 50.0001% wins” system inherently STRONGLY favors a 2-party system), oddly, the SMALLER faction can, in some cases, do much better than the larger: by moving the “center” to the left, the Republicans move left to court the “moderates”, taking the right for granted (what, are they going to vote for the “crazy lefties” instead or something?!?).
In theory, this could go the other way, as well, I suppose.
The Republican primary and the general are decided by ABR v. ABO.
If Perry was not such a disappointment, if Cain was not such a know nothing, if Newt was not so repulsive, if Santorum was not such a lack of accomplishment old-time politician, if …
Ergo, ABR will lose the primary, ABO will win the general.
Let’s be honest, shall we?
Rename ‘Republican’ ‘Democrat’, and then man up and rename the ‘Democrat’ party as it is ‘Communist’ as both more accurately reflect their policy positions.
Orion
Why don’t you have those figures? There are many, many people who don’t want you to have them. Many are in the media, but many more are in academia, and you should never lose sight of how many RINOs have become firmly attached to the government-media complex.
Data on ideological leanings of Republicans, Democrats and Independents are available from Pew.
See for 2010 data:
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1669/political-ideology-democrats-seen-farther-from-center-than-republicans
For 2011, see:
http://www.people-press.org/2011/09/12/more-now-see-gop-as-very-conservative/1/
Note that the question was “reversed” from one year to the next. Read it carefully to make cross-year comparisons. What basically happened is that the GOP came to be seen as “more” conservative in 2011 than they had been seen in 2010.
Also, in 2010 Pew asked the ideology of the Tea Party. This question and analysis may help you see how many Independents, for example, think themselves a good deal more conservative that the Republican Party itself.
Only 7% of Independents, for example, see the Tea Party as more liberal than they.
Could we reasonably assume that someone who’s a just bit more or a bit less conservative than they think the Republican Party is would be fairly happy to vote Republican? Further, might we agree that only those voters who think they are substantially different ideologically from the Republican Party would be likely to either vote Democrat or avoid voting?
A pretty good assessment of who the Democrats/Independents lean Democrat can be found here: http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/49247
At 42% level of approval with having done nothing to approve of, these are the hard core non thinking people who would support a Democrat over anyone else. Everyone else is just paying attention, and they don’t like it.
Another key question is left/right on what issues. I think most Tea Partiers and independents are either with the repubs or to the right of them on fiscal and limited/constitutional gov issues, but on socon issues I think they are moderate or even a bit left. One thing this does mean is Santorum might play well with the GOP evangelical base, but will not with independents or Tea Partiers. This is one reason why Ron Paul, despite his loopy foreign policy, is doing pretty well, with independent as well as GOP voters, and is even getting support from some dems. Romney is right to concentrate his campaign on fiscal issues, since that is the main concern of the electorate.