At least when it comes to taxes; environmental, financial, and consumer protection regulations; organized labor; and “national security,” to name a few key issues, Democrats have become more conservative over the last few decades. Today, AP writer Charles Babington revealed an important, though partial, reason why.
Babington wrote that the “dustup over contraception” illustrated President Obama’s strategy of attracting independent voters (that is, those voters who are between the Democrats and Republicans in a “liberal” to “conservative” spectrum) by modifying the policy that would have required employers to cover contraception in their benefits plans. Meanwhile, Obama’s “Republican rivals are forced to keep emphasizing their conservative credentials to attract the right-leaning activists who dominate the nominating contests.”
This seems right. As ACED has already written, it seems like President Obama and Democrats before him have actively sought to attract conservative voters. Republicans, to distinguish themselves and to retain the mantle of the “conservative” party, has moved to the right, as well. At least on some issues, the corruption of both parties by elite financial interests ensures a rightward movement. On other issues, it is “right-leaning activists” and voters who keep Republican politicians relatively (compared to the Democrats) conservative, which Babington points out.
But Babington is wrong in asserting that this normally happens “when a president seeks re-election without a primary challenger, and the other party fights to determine its nominee.” One only need to remember the last time this situation arose–2004–to see that his statement is false. The candidate who best embodied “liberal” values in 2004 was Howard Dean. Not surprisingly, Democrats strongly favored him. When all the nominees were grouped together, more than twice the number of Democrats picked him over his closest rival. In head-to-head battles with the other candidates, Dean “clobber[ed]” them. However, his campaign collapsed during the “nominating contests” because they are “dominated” by party activists (to use Babington’s words). Thus, the primary contests did not reflect the base.
The norm, instead, is for the Democrats to pander to the conservative voters regardless of whether they have the incumbent or are picking their eventual nominee through the primary process. This springs from the Democrats’ only apparent core-value – beat the Republican. Even though Dean was more popular among the base, if insiders feared he would be viewed as too liberal to capture conservative voters and so populist that he might alienate elite donors, they would reject him early on, killing his campaign.
Finally, ACED doubts that the the eventual Republican nominee will move meaningfully to the left to capture “independent” votes. In 2004, a CBS poll reported by Professor David R. Jones showed that Bush won re-election because of “two issues emphasized by the Bush campaign: terrorism and moral values.” That Bush emphasized those issues at least shows that he did not pursue middle-ground voters as hard as President Obama has, not just recently, but since he won the election in 2008. Of course, time will tell.
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