Back in 1989, the Progressive Policy Institute published a report by the University of Maryland's Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck, of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, entitled The Politics of Evasion, which is often cited as supplying the analytical foundation for Bill Clinton's successful presidential campaign of 1992. Last week, the Third Way organization released a sequel, called The Politics of Polarization, which provides a solidly researched benchmark for where Democrats are today, and need to go to regain majority support in the country.
Their analysis strongly reinforces the DLC's take on the state of the two parties after the 2004 elections. As Al From and Bruce Reed said in Blueprint magazine: "Democrats can no longer operate on the assumption that we will win national elections if we just get out our vote... We need a strategy to persuade voters and turn them out."
The central insight of the new Galston-Kamarck report is that today's hyper-polarized Washington political climate reflects an unprecedented "sorting-out" of liberals and conservatives into the two parties without changing the overall predominance of moderate voters who remain up for grabs. Understanding this is particularly important for Democrats; with conservatives continuing to heavily outnumber liberals, Democrats have to win higher margins among moderates and independents than ever:
The growing polarization has led many pundits and political operatives to believe that swing voters have all but disappeared and that base mobilization is therefore the be-all-and-end-all of contemporary politics. We disagree. During the past five elections, as partisan and ideological polarization has intensified, the Democratic presidential nominee's popular vote margin has varied from +8 to -8. The principal reason lies in shifting political preferences among self-identified independents and moderates. The Democratic margin among independents has ranged from +8 to -12. The variation among moderates has been even more striking -- from a low of +1 in 1988 to a high of +24 in 1996. Even in polarized times, national campaigns will be won or lost in the independent and moderate center of the electorate.
While the "great sorting-out" of liberals and conservatives has made the GOP dangerously dependent on a large and often-demanding conservative base, Republicans have adapted through targeted appeals to moderate voter groups, especially married women and Catholics, and have also relied on negative attacks designed to reinforce perceptions -- some old, some new -- of Democrats that repel the voters needed to forge a majority.
Galston and Kamarck provide a well-researched documentation of the shifting landscape of weaknesses Democrats can and must address. Bill Clinton's administration pretty much eliminated voters concerns on an earlier generation of cultural wedge issues (e.g., crime, racial quotas, welfare dependency, the death penalty), but a second generation has emerged (e.g., gay marriage, abortion, judicial activism, and "moral relativism"), in no small part because of the rise of religion-based voting, reversing a Democratic advantage on "family values" that existed as recently as 1986. Democrats' embrace of fiscal discipline has also reduced the impact of "big government" attacks. But Clinton never had much of an opportunity to prove that voter worries about the Democratic Party's credibility on national security were misplaced, and 9/11 suddenly made that concern paramount.
One of the most original contributions of The Politics of Polarization is its analysis of how voter concerns on "values" and national security interplay with careful assessments of candidate character, which can create or destroy a "bond of trust" on a wide variety of issues. "Candidates who appear cold, calculating, vacillating or elitist rarely succeed."
But Galston and Kamarck also warn against the temptation to treat this problem as a mechanical matter of candidate language or party communications strategies.
The way candidates talk undoubtedly makes a difference, but the best rhetoric
will fail if the public rejects the substance of a candidate's agenda or entertains
doubts about his integrity. Democrats are in trouble today, not only because they
lack compelling "narratives" that resonate with voters, but because they lack a
coherent approach to foreign policy, espouse positions on key social issues that
strong majorities of the electorate reject, and lack compelling economic proposals
that speak to the new economic challenges of the 21st century.
Or, as From and Reed put it last year: "The fortune we spend on campaign ads is only as good as what we have to say. The best ground game in the world can't win ground that's off-limits to our message. If we want to take back the majority, we need to mount just as massive an effort at pioneering new ideas."
On the two particularly large challenges of national security and culture, Galston and Kamarck's advice is characteristically blunt: Democrats must overcome the perception that they are averse to the use of military force, a perception that may be inadvertently reinforced by justified Democratic attacks on the incompetent Bush administration policies in Iraq. And they must be willing to get out of the trap laid by Republicans on hot-button cultural issues, exhibiting "tolerance and common sense" and an openness to people of faith, which could not only reestablish trust with moderate voters but help expose the genuine extremism of Republican policies.
If we could add any one point to Galston and Kamarck's analysis, it would be that the current and ever-escalating pattern of corruption, cronyism, and incompetence spreading throughout Republican-controlled Washington provides a unique opportunity for Democrats to turn the tables and raise major concerns about the character and values of the GOP -- if Democrats are willing to champion a robust reform agenda to clean up the mess.
The good news for Democrats in The Politics of Polarization is that its recommendations are fully consistent with the progressive principles of the party; can help them sharpen the critique of administration and GOP misgovernment; will vitally rebuild ties to the party's traditional working middle-class core; and could usher in another era of Democratic governance that will do much more than any campaign to create an enduring majority. All Democrats really have to give up is the illusion that anything less than an honest look at themselves and a comprehensive agenda for the country will suffice.
