The Not So Big Conservative Base

Stanford’s Morris Fiorina, one of America’s leading political scientists, has published a new book titled, Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics. Fiorina’s key thesis is that the American electorate is not nearly so polarized as many think – rather, the political leaders are polarized.  This would explain, perhaps, a pattern of sharp and quick backlash against uniparty government in the last two decades – witness the voter repudiation of Democratic Party control in 1994 after just 2 years of controlling both the executive and legislative branches; of all Republican government in 2006, after just 4 years; and now, it increasingly appears, of all Democratic government in 2010, already shaping up after just one year of Democratic power.  Given the full reins of power, each party seems to govern to the extremes of where the bulk of the electorate is.

Along the way, Fiorina makes a number of observations. One of the most important regards how Americans define themselves politically.  Conservatives have, for many years, taken solace in polls that consistently show that more Americans define themselves as “conservative” than “liberal,” including a recent Gallup poll showing a whopping 20 percent gap in favor of “conservative.”  Almost as a mantra, conservatives like to describe the U.S. as a “center-right” country.  What Fiorina points out, however, is that rank and file voters are not defining “conservative” in the same way as the pundits and politicos.  Fiorina’s polling data finds that fully one-third of those who call themselves conservative do not hold traditionally “conservative” views on either economic or social issues.  These people might be deemed “attitudinal conservatives.”  They are tired of gay pride marches, tired of anti-war protests, tired of what they perceive as liberal excesses seen in daily life, from crazy tort suits to school policies that expel kids for drawing a picture of a gun, fed up with what seems excessive, out of control spending.  But they are neither social conservatives on issues such as gay marriage and gun control, nor free marketers on the economy.  Fiorina finds that only about twenty percent of these self-identified “conservatives” are both free marketers and social conservatives.  That means that roughly eight to ten percent of the electorate is defining itself as “across the board” conservative. (Conversely, while self-described “liberals” are about half as many as self-described “conservatives,” they are much more likely to hold “liberal” views on both the economy and social issues, thus putting about 12 to 15 percent of the electorate down as “across the board” liberals.)

This suggests that Republicans need to re-establish the Reagan coalition of moderates, libertarians, and social conservatives.  This can be done, with each group finding the resultant product preferable to the liberal nostrums of the Democratic party.  But doing so requires that people stop the incessant arguments about who is a “true” conservative; stop thoughtless “RINO hunting,” and cease defining everyone who disagrees with them on some issue as “not conservative.”  This is, by the way, not a problem limited to any one part of this old Reagan Republican coalition – I see this tendency toward internecine war in all three camps. Reminiscent of the various guerrilla groups in Monty Python’s comic epic Life of Brian, libertarians, social conservatives, and moderates seem to hate no one more than the liberals – except each other.

It is true that other political scientists, such as Emory University’s Alan Abramowitz, have reached different conclusions than Fiorina, but I think Fiorina is the one who is more correct.  What Abramowitz notes is that there are big gaps in the electorate on many issues.  For example, 76 percent of Democrats favor government guaranteed universal health care, but just 31 percent of Republicans agree.  But what Fiorina picks up on, that Abramowitz misses, are questions of tone and degree.  Republicans and Democrats may sharply disagree, for example, on abortion or gun rights or gay marriage, on the war in Afghanistan, or on Obama’s regulation of the economy, but a great many Americans, if not most, would simply like to tone all these issues down, whichever side they are on.  Pollsters push these voters to choose – “do you support the President’s surge in Afghanistan (or not)?”; “Do you favor Roe v. Wade (or not)?”; “Do you support or oppose the President’s plan for healthcare?” etc.  If pushed between such bipolar options, yes, most Americans can take sides.  But many may feel that there are pluses and minuses on both sides.  They don’t want to be given the either/or choice that the pollsters demand.

Political leaders, like the pollsters, increasingly seem to benefit from forcing that either/or choice on voters.  Of course, in a two party system (which I support), it is true that on Election Day voters face an either/or choice.  But politicians have been trying to make that choice more stark than voters would like it to be, gambling that given two stark choices, the other side’s vision will seem the more extreme.  This would explain why Democrats are always so eager to paint Republicans as extremist wackos, and vice versa.  Republicans are happy if Jeremiah Wright and William Ayres are the face of the Obama administration.  Democrats want Michael Savage to be the voice of “conservative” America.  Each side figures that’s a battle it can win.

But does this leave an opening for a more moderate approach, one that does not fudge on core beliefs, but leaves more space for nuances of opinion, for degrees of agreement and disagreement?  I think so.  I have argued that the winning Republican ticket in 2010 and 2012 will be some sort of return to “normalcy,” if I can use the term Republicans used to win landslide victories in 1920, 1924, and 1928.  After a pair of high stress, crusading presidencies (Bush abroad, Obama at home), Americans, I think, will want someone who promises NOT to turn healthcare upside down; who does NOT try to make major changes in social security; who does NOT fan the flames of culture war from the left or the right, and who does NOT seek to radically change the American relationship to the world (something both Bush and Obama have undertaken), but merely to defend American interests and use American power prudently.  (See my piece on how Sarah Palin won in 2006 and became an incredibly popular governor – tactics she abandoned in 2008).

The failures of the Obama administration and the intellectual vacuum of the Democratic Party (has there ever been a party so bereft of new ideas; is there anything in their platform not from 1946 other than the disastrous “cap and trade”?) give Republicans a great chance to restore the Reagan Coalition to power.  No one got all they wanted from that coalition, but is there really any doubt that all elements got something, and that America came out the better for it?  But returning to power requires all oars in the water, pulling toward victory against the common foe, not arguing over who is the “real” conservative or demanding complete adherence to a single vision of the good life. We are in a position to seize a win of historic proportions, if we don’t self destruct first.