Beyond the Liberal Spin: The Realignment Underway

The election is now over and the results are in – except in Alaska, Colorado, Washington, and a congressional district here and there. And one by one the usual suspects are weighing in with their comments. Most of these are utterly predictable, and some are downright mendacious, as one would expect.

When President Obama denied that the biggest Republican victory since the 1920s was a referendum on the policies embraced by his party and his administration, he was either lying or deep in denial – and the same thing can be said about The New York Times, which opined yesterday in an utterly predictable manner that – while “Tuesday’s election was indeed a ‘shellacking’ for the Democrats, as President Obama admitted after a long night of bad news” – it “was hardly an order from the American people to discard the progress of the last two years and start over again.”

Mr. Obama was on target when he said voters howled in frustration at the slow pace of economic recovery and job creation. To borrow his running automotive metaphor, voters threw the keys at Republicans and told them to drive for a while, but gave almost no indication of what direction to drive in.

To believe this, one would have to be convinced that the voters were unaware that the Republicans were committed to repealing and replacing Obamacare, to extending the Bush tax cuts, and to reducing federal expenditures to the level of 2008. To argue its truth, one would have to ignore the Pledge to America – which is, of course, what our President and our erstwhile newspaper of record did.

This was, in fact, an election fought regarding first principles. Knowing that, the Democrats desperately sought to localize the conflict, and where they succeeded in demonizing individual Republican candidates, they won. In most districts, however, the results turned on national public policy. Over the last two years, the Democrats have been united for and the Republicans united against a set of measures that the voters were well aware of, and no legerdemain practiced on the polling data can obscure this fact. To say, as E. J. Dionne did in The Washington Post yesterday, that, “in fact, Democrats held onto moderate voters while losing independents,” is to avert one’s gaze from the obvious.

Fortunately, among the liberal prognosticators, there are a few honest men. William Galston, who was Bill Clinton’s domestic adviser, is one such. He is, alas, an unabashed proponent of extending Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. But he does not live in a bubble. Like William Daley – Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce – he saw the debacle coming, and for The New Republic he has written a brief, but sober analysis of what happened on Tuesday.

First, he points out, 2010 was in most respects a mirror image of 2006. The Republics got the same share of the vote in this year’s midterms that the Democrats got four years before – and vice-versa. Second, partisan turnout was very similar to that in 2006, and the same can be said for partisan mobilization. There was a slight decline percentage-wise in the turnout of voters under 30 and a marked increase in the turnout of seniors over 65. But this was by no means decisive.

What was decisive was a dramatic shift in voting by those who self-identify in the polls as independents. In 2006, the Democrats received 57% of their vote and the Republicans 39%. This year, the Republicans got 55% of their vote and the Democrats 39%. “If Independents had split their vote between the parties this year the way they did in 2006,” Galston writes, “the Republicans share [of the national vote] would have been 4.7 percent lower–a huge difference.” What, he then asks, accounts for this shift?

Here we reach the nub of the matter: The ideological composition of the electorate shifted dramatically. In 2006, those who voted were 32 percent conservative, 47 percent moderate, and 20 percent liberal. In 2010, by contrast, conservatives had risen to 41 percent of the total and moderates declined to 39 percent, while liberals remained constant at 20 percent. And because, in today’s polarized politics, liberals vote almost exclusively for Democrats and conservatives for Republicans, the ideological shift matters a lot.

To complete the argument, there’s one more step: Did independents shift toward Republicans because they had become significantly more conservative between 2006 and 2010? Fortunately we don’t have to speculate about this. According to the Pew Research Center, conservatives as a share of total Independents rose from 29 percent in 2006 to 36 percent in 2010. Gallup finds exactly the same thing: The conservative share rose from 28 percent to 36 percent while moderates declined from 46 percent to 41 percent.

Moreover, Galston adds, the drift of independent voters towards conservatism has been going on for at least twenty years. “In 1992, moderates were 43 percent of the total; in 2006, 38 percent; today, only 35 percent. For conservatives, the comparable numbers are 36 percent, 37 percent, and 42 percent, respectively.” His conclusion should provoke rumination:

The 2010 electorate does not represent a disproportional mobilization of conservatives: If the 2010 electorate had perfectly reflected the voting-age population, it would actually have been a bit more conservative and less moderate than was the population that showed up at the polls. Unless the long-term decline of moderates and rise of conservatives is reversed during the next two years, the ideological balance of the electorate in 2012 could look a lot like it did this year.

President Obama, the editors of The New York Times, and that reliable flack E. J. Dionne would be well-advised to do some rethinking. And John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and their merry women and men should take their cue from the Pledge to America. The conservatives are winning the argument. If, over the next few years, they stick to their principles and gently but firmly press their advantage at every opportunity, the realignment that I predicted on 2 August 2009 will become a reality.