Base Plus Swing Equals Victory

There was a thoughtful op-ed in the Washington Post a couple of days ago by Alan Abramowitz and Bill Bishop called "The Myth of the Middle." The money quote:

"When we combined voters' answers to the 14 issue questions to form a liberal-conservative scale... 86 percent of Democratic voters were on the liberal side of the scale while 80 percent of Republican voters were on the conservative side. Only 10 percent of all voters were in the center. The usual representation of the nation's voters isn't a nicely shaped bell, with most voters in the moderate middle. It's a sharp V."

Yes, polarization is a fact in modern American politics, and it's going up, not down. It used to be that the lowest a losing Presidential candidate in a landslide could go was high 30s to 40 percent, and that a 60-40 percent magnitude landslide happened relatively often: five times between 1932 and 1984. However, since 1984, we haven't had anywhere close to that kind of landslide: the margins have been (in percentage points) 6, 6, 8, 0 and 3. Instead of a national swing vote of about 20 percent, we're now seeing a swing vote of consistently less than 10, and in national congressional numbers as well as presidential races. The number of ticket splitters has also been trending lower for at least a decade.

All of this is making base voter mobilization more important than ever for the Democratic Party. Heavily Democratic demographic groups- African-Americans, (usually) Hispanics, (lately) young voters, unmarried women, labor union members, Jewish voters, gays and lesbians- can all be registered and turned out in far bigger numbers than they currently vote. But it takes the Democratic Party and non-profit groups spending serious money on it (which, yes, means less money for TV ads), and it takes candidates who will speak passionately to the issues that base voters care about.

Does all this mean swing voters or "playing to the center" doesn't matter anymore? Well, this is one place I do disagree with some of my fellow progressives. I've been sick of the debate between turning out the base vs. appealing to the swing for a long time. The campaigns that win are the ones that do both, and do them both well. Eight to ten percent of swing voters may represent half the number of swing voters than there were 25 years ago, but they are still crucial to deciding close elections. 2004 was a classic example: between non-profit groups, 527s, and the party committees, far more money was raised to run voter registration and get-out-the-vote of all the demographic groups listed above than had ever been raised before, probably more than five times as much. And it worked in terms of dramatically increasing the Democratic vote. But Republicans still won the presidency and congressional elections, both because they did an equally good turnout job and because they got to those crucial swing voters.

Having said all that, I don't buy for a minute the conventional wisdom, inside-the-belt-way crapola on how you appeal to swing voters. Lee Atwater nailed it 20 years ago when he said, "the swing vote in national elections is always populist in nature." Swing voters are not pro-big business, D.C. establishment, DLC style voters. They are middle-income voters who are worried about high taxes, economic change, declining moral values and terrorist threats. However, they are tired of being screwed over by energy and insurance companies and scared of many kinds of Republican extremism. Democrats win when they appeal to those voters, speaking language they can relate to and when they appeal to and turn out their base.