In Search of Independents

posted at 11:31 pm on July 19, 2009 by Doctor Zero

Independent and moderate voters are the key to winning elections, according to conventional wisdom. It seems like common sense to suppose that if roughly 40% of the electorate is reliably Democrat, and 40% votes Republican, victory depends on winning the bulk of the remaining 20% or so. Most people who don’t follow politics closely would agree with the statement that you can’t win an election if you lose the independent vote. A slightly more detailed version of this principle says that a winning candidate must energize his own base, depress his opponent’s turnout, and win the lion’s share of the independents.

Politicians with strong appeal to the conservative base are casually dismissed as doomed, because they would lose the independent vote in the general election. You probably didn’t make it to the end of the previous sentence without the image of Sarah Palin popping up in your head. Every single thing she has said and done, since erupting onto the national stage in the 2008 presidential election, has been confidently cited as the final nail in her coffin with independents. Even people who basically like her will shake their heads and sadly pronounce her unelectable for this reason.

It’s interesting to note that liberal Democrats are never said to be doomed among independent voters, no matter how far Left they are. Barack Obama was the most ideological, far-left major party candidate in recent history, but even when he mumbled Marxist cant in response to questions from a randomly encountered Ohio plumber, the media did not wonder if he might have jeopardized his standing with independents. No one in the mainstream press dismissed Howard Dean in 2004 as “unelectable,” despite his eccentric behavior and aggressively ideological platform. The smart set considered him to be an unstoppable juggernaut, right up until he self-destructed in the primaries. Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale are remembered by the media as noble liberals who made tactical mistakes in their campaigns, or were cheated out of their victories by underhanded methods. They are never portrayed as extremists rejected by moderate voters.

Media bias explains much of this, particularly in the case of Obama, who spent the 2008 election riding in a sedan chair carried by “journalists” with tingling legs. There’s more than slanted reporting at work, however. The political landscape has tilted in a collectivist direction for the better part of a hundred years. It began with the national wartime mobilization of World War I. It was ratified in Roosevelt’s New Deal, and became finalized in Johnson’s Great Society programs. Conservatives often speak of a fundamentally “center-right” country, but the center was dragged awfully far to the left between the 30s and 60s. The media is not entirely wrong to suggest that serious conservative candidates spend their entire campaigns in danger of losing the “independent” voter, because these voters accept some basic premises about the relationship of individuals to the State… and conservatism strongly rejects these premises. The rapidly deteriorating American economy and society cannot be fully restored, until conservatives convince enough voters to join them in this rejection, and move the “moderate” center of politics back to the right.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Americans came to see their government as having problems to solve, instead of duties to perform. The belief that only a huge, activist government can address most of the nation’s difficulties has become deeply ingrained in our thinking. Consider the casual willingness of average people to dismiss private charity, or free-market programs, as effective means of coping with poverty. No matter how enormous the failure of the Great Society’s constellation of welfare programs, no matter how much money is wasted, and regardless of how quickly the worst social pathologies have grown among the welfare class, the belief that only government can effectively “care” for the needs of the poor remains largely unshaken among liberal and moderate voters. Too many people are willing to accept the notion that government spending is the only way to measure how much society “cares” about any given problem. Manifest failure and outright corruption on the part of liberal politicians are forgiven, because they “care” so much.

The objective failure of Big Government programs doesn’t prompt the independent voter to turn on them – at least, not as quickly as conservatives would like. This is partially due to liberalism’s insistence that its results are immune from criticism, due to the moral urgency of its policies. It’s also due to the sheer, incomprehensible size of Big Government, which makes it easy to convince independents that even though a given socialist program was a disaster, things would have been far worse if the government had taken no action at all. You can hear exactly this argument being retailed today by Obama mouthpieces, in defense of the wasted $800 billion “stimulus” package.

The flip side of this belief in the urgency and justice of Big Government is also largely accepted by the electorate: if you wish to reduce government spending on any given problem, you don’t “care” about it. The desire to reduce the overall power and wealth of the government is seen as being motivated primarily by greed. The icy simplicity of collectivism is one of its selling points. The State is the collective will and justice of the people, so anything taken away from the State is being stolen from the people. It is remarkable how quickly the American mind calcified into this kind of thinking.

The 2010 and 2012 elections will offer an opportunity for conservatives to make real gains with independent voters, because the radical nature of the Obama Democrats makes it increasingly difficult for anyone to agree with them, while still pretending to be a “moderate.” What’s the moderate position on jacking up the national debt to 82 percent of the economy over the next ten years? Where does the moderate come down on the matter of government seizing control of private industries? How can you support people who want to steal thousands of dollars from working American families, to battle the imaginary menace of “global warming,” and still claim you’re parked squarely in the middle of the road?

What is an “independent?” If there was ever a time when someone could mix a precise selection of liberal and conservative beliefs into a finely blended tonic of moderation, while retaining a shred of intellectual consistency, that time has passed. Above all, the self-declared independent wishes to be seen as thoughtful and non-partisan, above grubby considerations of party and ideology. They want to be hailed for making informed decisions. In an era of thousand-page bills and trillion-dollar spending programs, the easiest way to appear thoughtful and informed is to repeat whatever the media assures you is the smart, compassionate position.

Many people who identify themselves as independent are actually moderate liberals or conservatives, who are alienated from the Democrats or Republicans due to a few specific issues. Others are more firmly on the Left or Right than they pretend, but they desire the aura of thoughtfulness that comes with proclaiming themselves to be above party and ideology. What unites every strain of independent is some degree of willingness to listen to reason… and reason is comprehensive. The sort of clumsy, unfocused campaign run by John McCain held little interest for the independent voter, because it was so obviously filled with his personal obsessions, blank spaces to be filled in later, and obvious ploys to attract specific blocs of voters. Nothing turns off independent voters faster than someone who seems to be running for President just because it was their turn to give it a shot.

Republicans need to win over independents, not pander to them. We must persuade them to climb against the slope of a political landscape that has been tilting left for generations, ever since America accepted the idea that its central government has the responsibility for fixing every problem in life, and the right to demand a limitless amount of their wealth and liberty to fund its efforts. In the Total State now under construction, the last thing anyone will be permitted is independence.

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