The ever recalculating electorate

Voters are using the mechanisms devised by the Founders to try to balance our politics

Acouple of years ago my wife and children and I were together for a family Christmas in a city other than our own. We moved about in a rented car with the aid of a GPS voiced by a British woman of a certain age. We named her Julia.

Julia was unflappable when we got lost, sometimes piling one wrong move upon another. “Recalculating,” she would say. It was reassuring. I thought of Julia and the merits and challenges of recalculation when a friend said to me recently: “I don’t get independent voters. I really don’t get swing voters. To me they are people who simply don’t know what they think and cannot make up their minds.”

Indeed, one could make the argument that the American voter has become more irrational, less predictable, maybe even schizoid in recent years.

The distance between Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman existed. But it was not monumental. Eisenhower, famously, declined to attempt a repeal of the New Deal, and the Fair Deal, which infuriated the Republican right and far right.

But the distance between Barack Obama and Donald Trump is great.

How did the same country pick both men?

Whereas Ike and Harry both inhabited what was once called “the vital center” in American politics — where there was consensus about many principles, especially in foreign policy, and the major difference was about implementation — Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump agree about almost nothing.

And their supporters regard the leader and icon of the other camp not as a flawed human being, but as the Antichrist.

Moreover, in the last presidental election, Mr. Trump signaled that he might not accept the result if he lost. But Hillary Clinton and her followers acted on that idea, which brought Mr. Trump massive, and deserved, condemnation. Ms. Clinton and her followers never accepted the result of the election, or the legitimacy of President Trump.

Hence, even on the most basic matter of consent and commonality, there is no consensus today. And the political center — once occupied alike by Bob Dole and Walter Mondale; Jerry Ford and Mike Mansfield; George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton — is no more.

Understood in this context, of a lost center, the dramatic swings of American voters — back and forth between parties and reactive movements, and consistent only in a preference for divided government — don’t seem so irrational.

If we look at American voting patterns of the last 25 years or so, going back to Bill Clinton’s loss of the majority in Congress to Newt Gingrich and a band of GOP rebels, we see that American voters are constantly recalculating.

The superb political scientist Morris Fiorina says this is necessary because the fringes of each party control the money, the nominations and ultimately the policy choices of each party. Therefore swing voters must choose from outside what would be the center. They must make their own implementation adjustments and then constantly correct the excesses of the people they elect.

A swing voter might have voted for Barack Obama hoping for banking regulation and jobs. He might not have wanted a national health care program.

An independent voter might have plunked for Donald Trump to “drain the swamp,” or to appoint conservative judges. He might not have wanted improvisational government or the indignity of profane presidential language.

So midterm elections, when Americans have always recalculated anyway, are exaggerated in the current era.

This is how I explain the remarkable showing of Conor Lamb in the 18th Congressional District. Mr. Lamb was a good “stand-up property,” as they say in the political trade, and ran a smart, aggressive campaign. But also, his opponent was primarily associated with divisive social issues like Second Amendment absolutism and prayer in schools. (Ex-Rep. Tim Murphy talked the talk on abortion, to his everlasting regret, but was moderate in tone and concentrated on mental health policy.)

The voters are weary of division, recrimination and namecalling and Mr. Lamb was moderate, civil and new. He hugged the center, knowing that recalculation was nigh.

Mr. Obama got his clock cleaned in the midterm election of 2010 — only two years after making American history.

Mr. Trump’s party will surely lose seats in 2018. Despite the stock market, astonishing job creation, and bringing a rogue power with nukes to the negotiating table, the president’s approval ratings remain low. No wonder. I have never in my lifetime seen a president, including Nixon, under such relentless attack.

I think the loss of consensus on the matter of legitimate elections and legitimate winners is pernicious, and incredibly dangerous for our democracy.

But I am not sure that recalculating is so bad. American voters are using the mechanisms made available to them by the Founders to try to balance our politics.

That swing voter who cannot make up his mind actually knows intuitively that no party or ideology has all the answers. And, as another friend brilliantly observed, the public policy medicines we need change with conditions and times. A doctor who prescribed only aspirin for all ailments, including cancer, would rightly be thought a quack. A doctor who prescribed only chemotherapy for all ailments, including headaches, would also be perceived as a fraud.

Different medicines fit different times, as Ike and Harry knew. The American voter is looking for balance. Not finding it inherent in our political culture these days, he is constantly forced to recalculate.