The 'Moderate' Myth
By Alan Pell Crawford
With the number of “independents” in this country rising, the political class is in a tizzy about how to respond. The President’s advisors, for example, are painfully aware that one in five Democrats have left the party since his election and that his approval rating among independents has plummeted. But Republicans are also worried about independents. This is why party leaders want them to nominate Mitt Romney who they believe will do better with this favored constituency than will more ideological conservatives.
But what makes these party leaders so sure? A Pew Research Center study suggests that the conventional wisdom by which political professionals live and die is flat wrong. The conventional wisdom holds that independents are “moderates” who reject the “extremes” of right and left. There’s scant evidence at all that independents are, as the Daily Kos puts it, “a sort of walking army of Midwestern Lutheran insurance actuaries.”
The evidence suggests that independents are a very mixed bag. They include, but are hardly limited too, a great many Democrats turned off by a Democratic Party that—in their eyes—has abandoned the party’s “core values.” There are also in their ranks thousands of Republicans alienated from a GOP that they are convinced has also forsaken its base.
‘Disaffected Partisans’
Independents, again to quote the Daily Kos, are really “disaffected political partisans.” So the way for the parties to win their support is not to waste time and money trying to woo nonexistent moderates: To win the votes of independents, you need to “motivate your base.”
Stanley Greenberg, a pollster who worked for President Clinton, has come to similar conclusions. There’s scant evidence, Greenberg tells New York Magazine, that independents are moderates who simply want the parties to meet somewhere in the middle and to run candidates who will compromise—Republicans who will, say, support some taxes hikes and Democrats who will back some budget cuts.
The political establishment has invested a great deal in the myth of the moderate voter, which is a serious miscalculation. The myth can be perpetuated only by refusing to recognize just how angry many Americans really are, and political leaders who refuse to recognize such anger, much less address it in constructive ways, do not remain leaders for long.
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