The Center Does Not Hold

Can you feel the political ground moving? That is the migration of several million working men and women in Middle America changing their political allegiances.

Out With Partisanship and In With Ideology

The Weekly Standard's exceptional political blogger Jay Cost recently noted that the American electorate is moving from self-identifying as plurality Democrat to Independent. While the percentage of the electorate saying they are Republican remains near its 50 year average of roughly 30%, the voters self-dentifying Democrat has collapsed to from about half the electorate in 1964 to a hair above the GOP levels. Those former Democrats have become Indis.



At the same time, the Indis are increasingly telling pollsters that they are conservative. The New Republic's William Galston noted that, during the 2006 election giving Congress to the Dems, the Indis reported their ideological makeup as 32% conservative, 47% moderate and 20% liberal. Just four years later during the 2010 election, 8% of the Indis who used to self-identify as moderate now said they were conservatives.

Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the Indis really did not change their ideology so much as the Democrats moved far to their ideological left. In 2010, the Pew Research Center polling found that Indis thought themselves to be center-right and far close to the GOP on the ideological spectrum than to the Democratic Party. Interestingly, the ideological breakdown of the Indis was almost identical to the electorate at large. In sum, the center-right Indis perfectly represent the center-right American electorate.



Unsurprisingly, the Indis who saw the GOP as a closer ideological match to their own beliefs either voted Republican or did not vote at all in the 2010 election. In 2010, the partisan breakdown of the electorate was nearly identical to 2006. The difference between the elections was that roughly a third of the Indis switched sides from the Dems to the GOP.

The White Working Class Leaves the FDR Coalition

The realignment of the center of the American electorate is not a broad-based phenomenon. Rather, white working class voters who formed the foundation of FDR's coalition have abandoned the Democratic Party en masse. In a new study, the Pew Research Center found that the GOP advantage over the Dems in party members and leaners among all white voters has increased from R+2 in 2008 to a massive R+13 today. The most pronounced shift is among white voters with a high school or some college education and a middle or low-middle class income - the white working class (WWC). Because the number of voters who self identify as GOP members has remained largely unchanged, these migrating WWC voters are Indis who now lean towards voting GOP.

In 2010, the WWC did vote for a GOP Congress. In Third Way polling, 53% of the voters who switched from voting Dem in 2008 to voting GOP in 2010 were Indis who heavily believe that government was "almost always wasteful and inefficient" and the Dems were "too reliant on government to solve problems.

Indis disapprove of President Barack Obama by similar margins. After a brief honeymoon period in the opening months of his administration, Indi approval of the President cratered in the summer of 2009 when the first Obamacare bill was made public and has since settled in the low 40% range.



The Center of the Center

Appropriately, the center of the American electorate has shifted the hardest against the Dems in the geographical center of the country. The Pew Research Center found that the white voters shifted the most toward leaning GOP in the midwest (+17%) and the what is probably the plains and Rocky Mountain west (+11%).

This shift manifested itself in 2010 when the voters painted the center of the national House of Representatves map almost solid red:



The center of the country appears to have similar plans for President Obama in 2012. In a recent Marist poll, voters in the midwest already plan to vote against Barack Obama by a 46% to 35% margin. If the undecided break along similar lines, every single midwest state except for maybe Obama's home state of Illinois will break against the President in 2012.

A recent Quinnipiac poll of Ohio well illustrates the realignment of the Indis in the midwest. In what is traditionally a bell-weather state that votes for the winners of presidential elections, Indi voters disapprove of President Obama by a 54% to 42% margin and say the President does not deserve reelection by a similarly daunting 51% to 40% spread.

In the past, WWC voters shifted against the Dems in similar numbers to elect Ronald Reagan to two landslide presidential victories in 1980 and 1984, and then to elect a GOP Congress in 1994. However, many of these voters subsequently migrated back to the Dems running centrist campaigns after two Bush administrations went into the business of expanding the reach of government. The question is whether the current shift back to a more conservative GOP running against a far left Democratic Party is a realignment or simply another marriage of ideological convenience.