Democrats Who Move Right Lose Elections – There Is No 'Center': Move Away From Your 'Base' and They'll Stay Home and Let You Go Down To Defeat

Photo by uzi978.

You have to deliver for and campaign to your base voters or they don't show up and vote for you. If Democrats don’t give regular, working people – the Democratic base – a reason to vote, then many of them won’t.

By Dave Johnson
Mainstream Democratic campaign consultants and pollsters typically tell candidates they should "move to the right" and campaign to the "center" with positions that are "between" the "left" and the "right." This is the way, they say, to "attract swing voters" who would be "scared off" by a candidate who takes populist positions that favor the interests of the 99 percent over the interests of the 1 percent.

Polling and experience show that exactly the opposite might be true.

This week Lynn Vavrek writes at the New York Times Upshot blog, in "The Myth of Swing Voters in Midterm Elections":

There just aren’t that many swing voters. ... Ultimately voters tend to come home to their favored party. There are relatively few voters who cross back and forth between the parties during a campaign or even between elections.

Looking at the Democrat loss in the 2010 election, this is the key:

The results clearly show that voters in 2010 did not abandon the Democrats for the other side, but they did forsake the party in another important way: Many stayed home.

Again: In 2010 "swing" voters did not "shift" toward Republicans. What happened was that Democrats stayed home.


2011 Pew Poll: Independents Aren't 'Centrists'

Who are the "independent" voters? In 2011 The Washington Post's "The Fix" looked at a Pew Research Center poll. In the post, "The misunderstood independent," Aaron Blake and Chris Cillizza wrote (emphasis added)

In politics, it's often tempting to put independents somewhere in the middle of Republicans and Democrats, politically. They identify somewhere in between the two, so they must be moderates, right?

A new study from the Pew Research Center suggests that's not so true anymore. Independents, in fact, are a fast-growing and increasingly diverse group that both parties are going to need to study and understand in the years ahead.

. . . Pew identifies three different kinds of independents. Libertarians and Disaffecteds are 21 percent of registered voters and lean towards Republicans; Post-Moderns are 14 percent and lean towards Democrats.

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