Myths about the election - Providence Journal

Lee Drutman: Myths about the election
Providence Journal

01:00 AM EST on Friday, November 24, 2006

BERKELEY, Calif. -- On Nov. 7, almost 79 million Americans -- roughly 40.4 percent of registered voters -- took some time out of their busy day to travel to their polling places, wait in line, and cast their votes. As far as turnout went, it was about average for a mid-term election, up slightly from 39.7 percent in the 2002 mid-term. (By comparison, an estimated 141 million Americans watched last year's Super Bowl).

Trying to make sense of the Democratic victories, the media quickly adopted a simple storyline and proclaimed a new paradigm: "Moderates Fed Up With Polarization," "Democrats Won with Votes on Loan," "GOP ceded the center and paid the price." And so on. The general consensus a couple of days later seemed to be clear: Karl Rove's once-brilliant play-to-the-base strategy was no longer brilliant. The voters were rejecting extremism this time around, and the Democrats somehow managed to have a few moderate candidates on hand to take advantage of this shocking new development.

As the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne put it (defining the conventional wisdom), "This election was the revenge of the center no less than it was the revenge of the left."

True, exit polls did show "independents" and "moderates" voting heavily Democratic; 57-percent-to-39 percent, and 60-to-38 percent, respectively. But one ought to interpret these results carefully. First of all, voting-behavior studies have consistently shown that the number of true "independents" is actually quite small -- most consistently vote one way or another, but prefer to think of themselves as independent (understandable). It is therefore a mistake to reify independents as a voting block, as many people do.

Voting-behavior scholarship also consistently shows that middle-of-the-road voters tend on average to be the least-informed and least-interested voters. This matters because it suggests another interpretation of what happened -- that among those know and who care the least about politics, those who lean Democrat turned out, while those who lean Republican stayed home. And the true independents -- who tend to be the least informed of all -- most likely made up their mind at the last minute based on a whim that could have just as easily gone the other way (if they voted at all).

If voters were resoundingly rejecting the extremist Republican agenda, then perhaps some self-identified Republicans should have been fed up enough to cross over and vote Democratic? This didn't happen. Exit polls showed that 91 percent of Republicans still voted Republican, just as 93 percent of Democrats voted Democratic.

Many were quick to dismiss the Republican play-to-the-base strategy as a failure this time around. But, given the widespread unpopularity of George W. Bush and of Republicans generally, that the election was even this close should be considered remarkable. Had George Allen not loosed "macaca" from his careless tongue, had a few thousand votes in Montana swung the other way, had Mark Foley been a more discreet pederast, had Iraq been just not quite that much of disaster, who knows? Maybe, by focusing on those who actually vote (remember, that's only about 40 percent of registered voters, and those voters tend to be the most partisan), the Republican base strategy made things closer than they should have been otherwise.

As for the birth of the new centrism many are proclaiming/hoping for, there is good reason to believe it will be still-born. For one, many of the losers in the election were Republican moderates from the Northeast, like Lincoln Chafee, Nancy Johnson and Rob Simmons. Without them, the Republican Party is likely to move even further right and be even less willing to compromise. And for all Bush's conciliatory talk of bipartisanship, six years of stubborn Democrat-bashing (particularly the over-the-top allusions to Democrats supporting terrorism) are hard to ignore. Moreover, Republicans have every incentive to frustrate Democratic attempts at lawmaking so that, in two years, they can then blame a Democratic Congress for accomplishing nothing; Democrats, meanwhile, will be increasingly tempted to use their investigatory power to make life unpleasant for Republicans, further polarizing the political atmosphere. Though it is true that some of the new Democrats are quite moderate, many of the new Democrats are also quite liberal. And especially in the House, those poised to ascend to committee leadership positions are among the most liberal members.

So, what's changed? In an election in which three in five of registered voters stayed home, Democrats won back the House and Senate by a narrow margin. This changes the balance of power in Washington (a major change, indeed). But it doesn't change that most people still don't vote in mid-term elections and that Democrats continue to vote solidly Democratic, and Republicans continued to vote solidly Republican. If it was a victory for the center, it was most likely only because Republican-leaning independents simply couldn't be bothered to vote this time around. Any claim to a new centrist paradigm rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of voting behavior.

-- Lee Drutman

Online at: http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/projo_20061124_25drut.2c3cf7e.html