It's the political equivalent of the beer drinker's "Less Filling, Tastes Great" debate -- and equally dumb: Should political candidates seek victory by "energizing" core party voters to boost their turnout, or try to attract swing voters who are likely to vote, but who may otherwise vote for the opposition?

It's a dumb question because you should obviously try to do both, as successful presidential candidates over the last half-century almost invariably have done. To name the most conspicuous recent example, President Bill Clinton found a way to use new ideas to both unite and expand the Democratic Party.

But as a front-page story by Adam Nagourney in yesterday's New York Times showed, the false choice between the party base and swing voters keeps turning up like a bad penny. Summarizing the latest wisdom of political strategists, Nagourney says: "Americans who move between parties -- known as swing voters -- are being overshadowed by a growing and very motivated base of Republican and Democratic voters." He goes on to quote a number of named and unnamed wizards who claim the sole key to victory for either party is simply to get the based revved up and win on sheer turnout.

Aside from its obviously unbalanced nature, there are a host of problems with the hypothesis that you can win with party loyalists alone. For one thing, there's a simple law of mathematics that New Democrat pollster Mark Penn often talks about: When you "energize" someone in your base to get out and vote, you pick up one net vote at the very most. But in reality, if you "energize" these voters with a polarizing message, you tend to help the other party energize its base at well, which at least partially, and sometimes completely, neutralizes your advantage. If, on the other hand, you can "turn" a swing voter in your direction, you pick up two net votes: one for you, and one less for your opponent.

More importantly, the base-only strategy cuts against one of the longest and most persistent trends in American politics: the steady decline in attachment to either political party, and the equally steady growth in the number of political independents. To cite Mark Penn again, his latest survey for the DLC shows there are now more independents than Democrats or Republicans. For all the partisan polarization and rancor in Washington, or in activist-dominated pockets around the country, outside-the-beltway America remains more non-partisan than partisan.

Nagourney's article suggests the two parties are equally monomaniacal about energizing their base voters at any expense. But in truth, the base-only approach represents political suicide for Democrats more than Republicans, for three reasons:

1. Democrats no longer have an advantage over the GOP in numbers of party loyalists, as they did from the New Deal until the 1980s. In fact, the most recent numbers show a small plurality for self-identified Republicans.
2. The Democratic Party is a coalition of liberals, moderates, and even conservatives, while the Republican Party is much more ideologically homogenous and thus more amenable to sharply polarized political messages. According to a recent Gallup survey, 33 percent of Democrats identify themselves as liberals; 43 percent as moderates; 23 percent as conservatives. Fully 60 percent of Republicans consider themselves conservatives.
3. As the above numbers suggest, there are now significantly more conservatives in the population than liberals, which basically means that in a highly polarized election the GOP base is simply larger than the Democratic base. Democrats typically need to win more than 60 percent of moderates nationally to win a presidential election.

To be sure, it makes no sense to go to the opposite extreme and ignore common-sense get-out-the-vote (GOTV) measures that can get party loyalists to the polls in as large a number as possible. The obsession of political strategists during the 1980s and 1990s with spending every available dollar on television advertising often led to an under-investment in GOTV, apart from the heroic efforts of the labor movement that gave Democrats a perennial advantage in this area until 2002.

But subordinating the party's message to a base-mobilization strategy is another thing altogether. Deploying a message that is designed to work up partisans into a hate frenzy about the evil opposition may or may not increase core voter turnout, and may or may not succeed in increasing one's own vote more than it increases the vote of that hated opposition. But at least in this particular era, it is pretty much guaranteed to limit the perpetrator's appeal to swing voters. And once again, the whole idea of candidates campaigning this way misses the big opportunity of a message that can appeal both to the party core and to swing voters.

Pollster Stan Greenberg, who advocates the more balanced approach, explained the appeal of pure energizing-the-base strategies in the Times as follows: "It's a lot easier to do than to go out and convince swing voters to think differently about the party." There's no question about that. But the easy way is rarely the best way in politics, or in government. Beyond all the arguments about the political efficacy of high-octane partisanship, a more rational, issues-oriented approach to politics will help ensure that elected officials will actually address the big challenges facing the country, which on occasion will require some degree of bipartisan cooperation.

Let's hope the current mania for winning without persuasion fails, as should any competing idea about winning without passion or commitment. Any political party or candidate who cannot compete for both kinds of voters with both kinds of appeals is incapable of walking and chewing gum, and deserves to fail as well.