What is it with the left wing (small ‘l’ liberal) in Australia and the USA? They seem to think that the only way to have “credibility” on major issues is to side with the government.
The Democrats and the Labor party need to face up to the fact that you can’t win an election by making voters who support the other side vote for you. You win an election by making sure that the people who agree with you actually vote for you.
Take the issue of immigration in Australia. People who support the Howard government’s treatment of refugees are going to vote for Howard, and there’s nothing the Left can do about it. On the other hand, 40% upward of the population HATE the government’s policy, and will vote for anyone who opposes it.
Similarly with the wars in Iraq and Afganistan. A good 30 - 40 % of the population actively HATE Bush’s international politics. Those people are looking for any excuse to vote against Bush.
Let’s do the math. If you can capture 40% of the popular vote on one issue, how does that stack up? Well, let’s say half of them were going to vote for you simply along party lines, a quarter are swing voters and a quarter would normally vote for your opponent. That means you’ve earnt yourself 10 points from the undecided/will not vote crowd, and captured 10 points from your opponent.
Now of course, this is too simplistic. Many people won’t vote on one issue. But there are a bunch of related, left wing issues that people really care about - Iraq, health care, refugees, social spending.
Stop trying to “appeal to the center” dammit! People who want tax cuts aren’t going to vote for the Left. People who agree with the war aren’t going to vote for the Left. People who are scared
aren’t going to vote for the Left.
People who disagree with the government WILL vote for the Left, but only if you give us a real alternative.
Everyone disagrees with the government, and everyone disagrees with each other.
The error you seem to make is assuming the population is equally distributed along the political spectrum; it’s not, it’s more like a bell curve. If you can get 100% of the “hard left,” that’s still less votes than getting 50% of the “center.” And in a 2-party system, all I have to do is run as “I’m not a hard-core leftist” and I’ll win.
In the US at least, there simply aren’t enough true-left purists to win an election or even come close. See “Nader, Ralph”
Furt, your assumption is that the population is mostly centrist, and while that certainly seems to be the position of the US Democratic Party, I don’t know that this is true. I think there’s a fairly large contingent of rather dissatisfied leftists out there, feeling pretty disenfranchised as the Republican Party moves further and further to the right, through strong mobilization of their constituency, and the dems move rightward as well. It’s a mistake on the part of the democratic party to assume that a move towards center is helpful; being indistinguishable from the other side is probably not really politically useful.
Why the heck is Howard Dean doing so well compared to the other, largely centrist (or right-leaning, in the case of Lieberman) democratic hopefuls if most USians are politically centrist? The democrats’ problems stem from alienation of their constituency as a result of their constant rightward shift.
Imagine a pair of hotdog stands on a beach. One is toward the west end of the beach, and the other is toward the east. Presume that the hotogs they sell are of similar quality and the prices are similar. In that case, people will generally just walk to the nearest hotdog stand to get a snack.
People who are farther west than the western-most hotdog stand will always stop when they get to that stand; and people who are farther east than the eastern-most hotdog stand will always stop at that stand. The two hotdog stands are only really competing over people who have set their blankets on the beach between the two stands. The western-most hotdog stand could grab a chunk of this business by moving its location further east. There is no need to move west to appeal to people who are on the west end of the beach. In fact, the western hotdog stand can even inconvenience those people slightly, and still get their business.
Eventually, both hotdog stands will end up near the center, pretty close together. They won’t be located side-by-side, or they will risk losing their half of the beach to the other due to even slight fluctuations in price or quality. Effectively, they will be close enough together that worrying about the few people in the middle is less important than preventing enough people to the “outside” to support a third hotdog stand on either side.
But that rightward shift worked for Clinton. I think the Democrats’ problems are more complex than you indicate. They stem from the rightward shift of the Democratic party, coupled with the leftward shift of the Republicans (at least during election times), and the rightward shift of fringe parties like the Greens.
And, when considering Howard Dean’s popularity, remember that that observed popularity exists largely among registered Democrats, not the population as a whole. I hope we would not find it contentious that the “center of registered Democrats” lay to the left of the “center of everybody”.
Newton, but if oth hot dog stands are too far away from people on the far edges of the beach, some will consider it to be too far away and will not bother to walk the distance (i.e. will protest by not voting, or will not be motivated enough to vote since it “wont make a difference”.)
The majority of the Democrats’ problems have little to do with being in the center or left or not. It’s the change of party affliliation in the South.
Over the last fifty years the party hasn’t moved left. The Southern Democrats are now simply Republicans. And they haven’t moved much left or right, just the label and which party they now vote for.
If you look over the last century or so, Democrat strength now is pretty much in the historic middle, if you exclude the South. Sometimes it has been greater and sometimes less.
Dean is doing well because primaries do not reflect political reality, but instead the political desires of the most politically active members of each party’s base, both of which are more to the fringe than either the population or their party as a whole. Those who vote in Republican primaries tend to be notably more conservative than those who vote for Republicans in the general elections, with the mirror being true for the Democrats.
Unless some idiot opens a far-westward “Nader’s Granola Bar and Kiwi Juice Stand” and convinces the poor beach-goers around him that granola is really what they’ve been wanting to eat, anyway.
The ‘capture the center’ theory is known as the median voter theory. Newton meter has done a decent job of explaining it.
The trouble with that theory is that the prediction that it generates (one candidate very very slightly left of center, one candidate very very slightly right of center) is obviously not consistent with reality.
That’s because of the point Ludovic brings up. People have a choice to vote or not. So turnout matters. You have to get your ‘base’ excited about you.
There’s a constant tension between running to the center to get closer to the median voters and running to the middle of the left or right, to maximize turnout.
Right, for the exact reason that you noted (beachgoers might start to bring picnic lunches if all the hotdog stands are two far away), as well as something that I alluded to.
What happens is that, eventually the middle becomes small enough that it’s less important than (a) getting people on the ends to buy hotdogs from you and (b) preventing a third hotdog stand from popping up on the beach.
It also seems reasonable that, if the candidates are too close together, then they become virtually indistinguishable, and the outcome of the election can rest on very tiny perceived differences (like who sweats more in the first debate).
And hopefully it’s obvious that our beaches aren’t really linear, but n-dimensional. So candidates have quite a few degrees of freedom to move around.