Meeting in the middle suddenly in style
WASHINGTON — Moderates have lately been out of fashion in American politics.
On the right, conservative Republicans scorn their party’s moderate wing as RINOs — Republicans in name only. On the left, progressive Democrats spent much of the last year and a half yelling at their party’s moderates, most notably Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, as they blocked some of the party’s priority bills and whittled others down.
In both parties, activists have pushed the idea that the path to victory lies in mobilizing committed partisans — their voter bases — rather than in trying to persuade often-elusive swing voters.
But fickle fashion fades, and the moderate moment may have come ’round again.
Democrats’ fortunes have improved significantly in the 21⁄2 months since the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe vs. Wade. Several factors are at play in that shift — declining gasoline prices, Democrats’ success in enacting parts of their agenda, as well as the abortion issue. But if Democrats hold on to a majority in the Senate — as many election analysts now forecast — the Republican failure probably will stand as a lesson in the risks of alienating moderate voters.
Judging by the makeup of Congress, a person might think that the center had disappeared from American politics.
Display the ideologies of members of Congress visually, and you get something that resembles two mountain peaks with a deep valley in between — one cluster on the left containing nearly all of the elected Democrats and another on the right including nearly all of the Republicans.
Even the few outliers from each party do not overlap — the most centrist Republicans, people like Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, have records that put them to the right of Manchin, Sinema and other centrist Democrats.
That didn’t used to be the case. Go back a generation, and Congress included a large number of conservative Democrats and a few liberal Republicans whose voting records overlapped and who sometimes served as bridges between the parties.
What once was the case among elected officials remains the norm among the public at large, notes UCLA political scientist Chris Tausanovitch.
“In the world of elected officials, there’s a break” — an empty spot separating left from right — Tausanovitch said. “In the public, there’s no break. Instead, the most common place to be is in the middle.”
Tausanovitch is among a group of political scientists who recently published a study that makes clear how important moderates are in American politics.
About 4 in 10 Americans identify as moderate, a share that’s been pretty consistent over the last 30 years, according to Gallup’s annual surveys. (The share that identifies as conservative is a bit smaller and has declined a bit in recent years, and about 1 in 4 identify as liberal, a number that has grown a bit.)
But what makes those moderate voters tick has been much debated.
One school of thought is that many people who define themselves as moderate simply don’t pay much attention to politics and hold few if any consistent views on issues.
Another says that the center consists heavily of people who hold a grab bag of conflicting positions — liberal on some points, conservative on others — which makes them hard to characterize or appeal to politically.
In other words, are moderates people who “just have no idea of what’s going on, or do they have extremely idiosyncratic views” that just don’t fit, asked UC San Diego political scientist Seth Hill, another of the study’s authors.
The research showed that neither of those answers is correct for most moderates. Only a small group, about 6% of Americans, give answers on surveys that appear to be almost random. A larger group has strongly held conservative views on some issues and liberal views on others, but they’re still only about 20% of the population.
The rest, about threequarters of U.S. adults, hold views that can be arrayed pretty consistently along a left-to-right spectrum. And most people cluster in the middle.
Although moderates don’t engage in politics as intensively as more partisan voters, they have a strong ability to sway elections. They’re heavily represented among voters who shifted from one side to the other between the 2012 and 2016 elections, for example.
“Political discourse has shifted toward mobilizing the base,” Tausanovitch said. But “there’s a real basis for thinking that catering to the middle of the spectrum matters.”
Of course, for a lot of members of Congress, swing voters don’t matter. If you’re a member of the House from a district or state that’s dominated by your party, there’s little chance of losing a general election. Instead, your main political worry will be your party’s primary, and your chief goal will be to avoid upsetting committed partisans.
The combination of gerrymandered districts and partisan primaries contributes heavily to that gap where the congressional center used to be.
But neither party has enough safe seats to form a majority. Getting to 218 votes in the House or 51 in the Senate means winning over moderate voters in swing states and districts.
As the new research highlights, a lot of those swing voters are what Hill calls “ambivalent centrists” — voters who are “confronted by two party coalitions that each express views that are more extreme on some issues than the moderates would prefer.”
A large majority of Americans opposed overturning Roe vs. Wade, and in the weeks since the court took that step, the opposition has grown. Even larger majorities of Americans oppose total bans on abortion, which have been adopted by nine states, or bans that take effect very early in a pregnancy, which are now the law in five states.
Since the Roe reversal, abortion has grown in importance as an issue for voters. In a new Marist College poll for NPR and “PBS NewsHour,” 22% of registered voters said abortion was the top-of-mind issue for them as they think about the midterm election, second only to inflation at 30%.
And although voters who identified as political independents — a group that’s not quite the same as political moderates but overlaps a lot with them — listed inflation as their top concern, 58% of them said they were more likely to vote because of the high court’s abortion decision. The poll also found Democrats holding a lead, 48% to 44%, when voters were asked which party’s candidates they were more likely to vote for this year — a mirror image of the 47%44%% lead Republicans held in April, before news leaked that the court was likely to overturn Roe.
Some of the improvement in Democrats’ standing comes from progressive voters who were newly energized by the abortion issue, but a large share appears to come from swing voters.
“In the spring, when the dominant issue was inflation, it was pretty clear what their choice would be,” Hill said, referring to those ambivalent centrists. Now, with abortion surging as an issue, “we just don’t know.”