Was reading this commentary on CNN and thought I’d see if it might spark some debate here on the 'dope. Particularly this section:
Assuming you agree with the commentators premise that:
And that:
My question for debate is…why? Why are centrists so (seemingly) under-represented in US politics (by either party), while both parties go through the motions and mouth phrases targeted at those very centrists?
In addition, and again in the words of John Feehery:
He of course goes on to answer this from his own perspective…but I want to hear 'dopers views on this and the other questions. So…thoughts?
I think that a Democrat cannot be elected unless they are a Centrist whereas a Republican cannot be elected unless they are not a centrist. Though, George HW Bush was fairly moderate. I’d argue that Bill Clinton was pretty centrist, and Barack Obama while not a centrist isn’t super far to the left. The left is already turning on him for not being leftist enough.
I don’t believe that any Democrat could get through the primaries in a national election if they didn’t appeal to the left. Obama certainly DID appeal to the left during the primaries…which is why he got the nod.
Once he won the nomination he moved towards the center…but then again, so did McCain. Same with every other election I can think of. Getting the parties nomination means playing to the left/right wingers…but once granted they all seemingly run toward the center. That’s the point of the OP. Why is it like this? And why doesn’t either party skip the stupid left/right catering part and appeal directly to the centrists and independents from the get go??
First of all, I think people have a fictionalized idea of what a centrist is. Oh, it’s a conservative Democrat? That’s a centrist! A liberal Republican? That must be a centrist, too!
But hold on, other than saying that someone on the right side of a left party (or vice versa) is a centrist, what is a centrist? I often hear that centrists are social liberals, fiscal conservatives. That’s a great catch phrase, but I really don’t think it summarizes what centrists really are. For example, fiscal conservatism: that generally means cutting taxes on the more wealthy to spur economic growth, and reducing spending to balance budgets. I don’t think that sounds like most self-described centrists that I know!
Until there’s a coherent explanation of what a centrist is, I don’t buy that they’re underrepresented in politics. If anything, the system has a bias towards centrism.
One final thought: I think because “liberal” is such a dirty word in today’s politics, I think there’s more than a few folks who ought to be considered liberal, who instead call themselves centrists in order to distance themselves from a bad term.
Politics is a continuum. Far left to far right. Naturally there is a center in there and I think to be a “centrist” you need to be within some range of that middle point. So, you could be a liberal-conservative or a conservative-liberal or whatever and still fit in the description of a centrist. Centrism is not a single collection of policy objectives.
Partly I see the problem as candidates wanting to distinguish themselves from the other side. Having a centrist stance where you agree largely with other centrists and try to distinguish yourself from them to get elected is just not enough of a juxtaposition for most people to latch on to.
So, most hew to a more distinctly left/right rhetoric to show the difference between “Us v. Them”.
I’m talking about before the nomination. He specifically reached out to moderate Republicans and Independents in states with open primaries. I really honestly did not see what you saw.
The mechanism of two-party politics, which is so thoroughly entrenched in our system that it is almost impossible to see how a viable third party could exist, precludes centrism. While a party can try and appeal to central voters during a general election, it must keep its base of supporters happy to be certain of having a minimum amount of support at the general election. To do this, it tends to appeal to that core of more hard-core supporters with rhetoric between election cycles and during primaries. It’s only when the support of voters who are not unambiguously lined up with one “side” or the other is needed that the parties start making noises about being more moderate in their views.
As a centrist, one is often left feeling like a jilted bride. The fact that this happens over and over is at times disheartening.
The weird thing is both far-left and far-right have been in some balance. It is the swing voters in the middle that decide the election. I think it is for this reason that conservatives are currently screwed. Dems at least appear to be nearer the middle while many on the right seem to want to run as fast as they can further to the right. This alienates that all-important middle ground and hence conservatives lose elections.
The opposite occurs. This is basic median voter theory stuff. Ignore the rhetoric and look at the actual policy outcomes. Hell, look at who decides elections.
The idea of a “centrist” is also kind of canard, for reasons similar to the ones Ravenman points out.
But let’s think about it another way. Please bear with me on this thought experiment.
People think of politics naturally as a continuum, and that is sometimes fair. But if you really want to find where the center is, you need to be more sophisticated. Using just one axis of self-reported “left” and “right” is totally inadequate if you want to win an election.
Instead, let’s take every important issue and rank one’s preferences over it from 1 to 9, where 9 is most conservative and 1 is most progressive. Make each of these issues its own axis, or dimension. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Let’s keep things simple. Suppose people, on average, have only six issues they care about, and each can be rank ordered. So now not only do people have left-right preferences, their preferences over issues have weights that represent the trade-offs they are willing to make. For example, I might tolerate three points of Candidate A’s wrongness in taxation per point of rightness in abortion rights. This is just a way of reflecting that I care more about one issue than another.
Great, so let’s go to town and give those unhappy centrists some power.
We have a six dimensional issue space. Each voter supplies two arguments per issue, his orientation and the issue’s weight. Ok, so it really is more like twelve dimensions now, but the values of the weight dimensions are constrained because we are forcing a strict rank ordering of the issues.
Let’s round up, say, a thousand people, poll them, assume they are completely honest, representative, and that selection bias is zero. Now we have a lovely 12-dimension map of a random sample of voter preferences. We’re almost there, I promise.
Last and most important step, we want to win an election, so we need to pick a platform. We need to find the exact combination of voter preferences (the hyperplane, if you like jargon) that will deliver at least N/50 + 1 of the votes. We would expect this hyperplane to be in, roughly speaking, the “center”. This political platform would have to at least minimally satisfy enough people to win you the election. Try to think about what this hyperplane, or political platform, or issue space, or whatever looks like in twelve dimensions.
So here we run into some conceptual difficulties. There is not a lot we can really say about this hyperplane. We really do not know if it is unique. We do not know if such a hyperplane even exists for a given set of voters. Please recall that this is a brutally simple model with some unrealistic constraints set on preferences and on voter behavior. It is phenomenally difficult to find and characterize who really lives in the “center”. For all we can actually tell, no one does.
You don’t need a centrist party to enact centrist policies. The logic of two-party party politics takes care of that.
a) Even a leftist or rightist candidate will have to appeal to the centre in order to win elections and will need to follow up with centrist policies while in office. Examples include welfare reform by Clinton and the prescription drug bill Bush.
b) If the two parties alternate in power, to some extent their actions will cancel each other out and push policy towards the middle. So Republicans will cut taxes on the wealthy and then Democrats will raise them back as happened with Reagan and Clinton. Then Bush cut taxes back again and Obama is likely to raise them again. Taxes as a proportion of GDP have been roughly the same for decades.
c) You need 60 senators to pass most legislation in the US. This inevitably requires compromise with centrist senators whether from your own party or the other. We are seeing this with Obama’s legislative initiatives today.
But independant =!= centrist. There are plenty of independents who think the Pubs are too liberal, or who think the Dems are too conservative. And you have libertarians and others who don’t fit the 1-D spectrum.
I don’t have much to add, except to point out that this post is outstanding. The two most important points here are that “centrist” is a word with a completely pulled-out-of-the-ass meaning to begin with, and the two party system is biased toward middle-ground compromise. There will never be an American government elected with less than 50% of the vote.
In what part of my post did I say centrists didn’t “decide” elections? :eek:
What I SAID was that the parties love to try and get the centrists on their side during a general election, but during primaries, and during the intra-election periods, are often more concerned about their bases. The current Judge Sotomayor kerfluffle is an example. The Democrats have to explain to their base groups why Judge Sotomayor is a confirmed liberal, the Republican politicians will play up to their extremists in attempting to act like she’s got no valid reason for being on the Court.
Of course, in the end, the actual result of the posturing will be something that is middle of the road in many cases, because that’s what happens when compromises are made. That’s not contrary to anything I said, either.
I have to agree with mswas’s assessment, as well as his take on Obama’s candidacy.
The problem (for the GOP) is that right now, a Republican can only get nominated if they are not a centrist, and then they lose the general election because they are so far right of center.
I also agree with Lantern
What I’d really like to see tho is the death of the so-called 2 party system and instead let’s have a multi-party system with a coalition government formed, similiar to Canada or the UK.
It’s also hard to find people who are energetically moderate about something. Let’s just take abortion for one example:
If you believe that a fetus is a human life and that abortion is murder, you will feel strongly about it. You will form/join groups and participate actively on this issue.
If you feel that it is strictly a woman’s choice and that people try to make this illegal to force their own morality on you and keep you in your place, you will also feel strongly, form groups, and attempt to influence opinion.
If you are naturally sort of middle of the road, you can see both sides, etc. you don’t chain yourself to an abortion clinic door or get arrested outside of the Supreme Court building trying to advance your cause. You go about your life and vote based on other issues. So you can vote for Bush and then four years later vote for Obama.
And, incidentally, you would have been on the winning side both times. Centrists usually get what they want, while the right and left rarely do…
The commentators in the OP cite the Pew Research Group. But the Pew Political Typology certainly does not support the conclusion that “centrists are the majority” in America.
