Two conflicting views of swing voters

[dsc]

The DLC and other moderate Democrats have one theory of how swing voters behave. Under their theory, centrist voters are actually in the center of lots of issues. They favor a little bit of abortion rights. They favor some gay rights. They favor some progressive taxation etc.

They defend this theory with two things. One is polls showing majorities favor certain positions on abortion, gay rights, and taxation and the second is the electoral success of Bill Clinton. That is they take polls showing around 60% support for Roe but less than 30% for partial birth abortion or 75% support for employment rights for gays but less than 40% for gay marriage and suggest that the same set of people are in the middle position in both polls and that those are the people who voted for Bill Clinton and then voted for Bush.

But what if they are wrong. What if instead of massess of voters who can't make up their minds on the issues of the day, we have massess of voters who have made up their minds on the issues of the day but don't agree on all of them with either party? In short, what if we have voters who agree with us on economics but not social issues and other voters who agree with us on social issues but not economics? Or maybe voters who agree with us on Iraq but not abortion? Then what do we do?

We certainly don't do what the DLC view would have us do. Instead we take more certain positions and hope that people will vote on those they agree with us on.

So which theory is right. Honestly, though I tend to favor the second view I don't have direct evidence of it. But the DLC doesn't have direct evidence either. Clearly the Bush campaign, which tied Al Gore, and beat John Kerry, holds the second view of swing voters. They don't moderate their stands. They run full bore with their issues. And with that, they have been very sucessful in national elections. I also find some back up for my theory in Congressional elections. The Dakotas have 3 Democratic Senators who are quite liberal on economics but conservative on social issues. These Senators have won reelection in states which voted for Bush by nearly 3 to 2 margins. Conversly DLC style candidates have been wiped out in the South. A look at our current Senate shows that praire populits have been doing quite well while DLC inspired candidates have not.

If the second theory is correct we should be moving left not muddying our message.

[Zynx]

1. Indeed. Being mealy-mouthed is not being centrist.

If our positions balance out to be centrist, that's one thing. However, not taking stands is not centrism.

[ArbustoBuster]

2. Here's one guy's view

I'm a centrist. (Yes, yes, everyone can stop hissing at me now. :))

I believe in progressive taxation. I believe that capital gains should be taxed strongly, and that estates over a certain amount (say, a couple of million dollars) should be taxed at a very high rate to preclude the creation of an aristocracy. I believe in full rights for gays including marriage, adoption, and equal employment protection. I believe in the equality of all men and women, regardless of race or ethnic background. I believe in a woman's right to choose. I believe in governance within Constitutional limits, including not torturing prisoners, not engaging in an illegal war, and not lying to Congress to start that illegal war.

However, I also believe that government-funded health care for everyone will collapse the economy. I believe that we need to balance the needs of workers with the needs of small business owners, while remembering that workers are people and not machines for making money. (I believe that large businesses should fend for themselves, however.) I believe the war in Afghanistan was justified, and that if Bush hadn't gotten bored/greedy and wandered off into Iraq, we could have done a lot of good there.

I loved Bill Clinton. He was my kind of Democrat, and I'd like to see more like him. But I'll vote for anyone the Democratic Party puts forward in '06 and '08, no matter what he or she might espouse, as long as it will remove the current batch of Republican thieves and criminals from office.

[Telly Savalas]

3. Canada and most of Europe have govenment funded health care

for everyone, and the economies there are just fine.

[flaminbats]

5. I believe our economy will collapse without universal health care..

Baby-boomers will soon retire, with age shall come more health problems and higher health care costs. But more of their children will be uninsured, unemployed, and further in debt.

We can kill two birds with one stone. Medicare taxes will ultimately go up because the number of people paying in will continue to drop, but the number of people receiving benefits will increase. If Medicare continues as a program, we need to make it worthwhile to younger workers paying the bill. If we insure all who pay into this program and retrain unemployed children of baby-boomers for jobs in the health care sector, then we can avoid any economic problems caused by higher unemployment and lower wages among younger taxpayers. We would also prevent a crises for retiring baby-boomers by keeping Medicare solvent..while increasing the supply of health care.

[Solon]

6. Government-Funded Health Care would be more efficient for one...

Look at Medicare, a 3% overhead cost, whereas the current system of private insurance funding private hospitals and investing in shaky markets also leads to an overhead cost of 30-50% or even more. This includes paying for overprice CEOs and other idiocies.

Remember the biggest hit to the economy would be from the Insurance companies themselves, but they also have other sources of revenue, many offer auto/life, and alternative insurances, and they can continue to do so. They can even offer other types of health insurance, for cosmetic surgery, etc. excluding reconstructive surgery, which would be covered by the government program.

There is always a possibility of them overcharging auto insurance payers to cover the loss of revenue, but then again, it is a requirement of law to have auto insurance, owning a car and all, so, the government is well within its rights to cap month premiums for varying types of coverage.

It will be a transition, but not nearly as painful as what many Americans go through now. Not only can we afford it, we can afford it and have a freaking surplus as well, if we ever got our priorities straight.

[CTLawGuy]

10. Universal health care will not collapse the economy

if anything it will strengthen the economy.

Under our current system:
1. the adverse selection problem (where people more likely to be sick will be more likely to buy insurance) causes companies to overcharge for insurance, wondering what the buyer is not telling them about his or her health.

2. people are stuck in suboptimal jobs. If I'd be better and would be happer doing job A, but I need to take job B because job B has health insurance and A does not, then the economy is not as efficient as it could be.

3. people will fall into bankrputcy if they have no insurance and a disasterous health problem comes up. These people cannot get credit and cannot effectively contribute to the economy as much as they could before the health problems.

4. there is wasteful spending managing the hodgepodge of government health care programs, each with their own bureaucracy.

If there is a single payer system, the economy would actually be much better. Insurance would be cheaper because of there being a single buyer in the market. People would move to the jobs they really want to take but couldnt' before, and poor people would be more likely to take preventative action for their health problems.

[Czolgosz]

12. Don't you worry that private healthcare for most will collapse the economy

because the uninsured are seeking care from the emergency room (which is highly inefficient) or they put off preventative care (which is less cost-efficient because it results in more catastrophic care) and because private insurance for employees is becoming a crippling business expense (I should know, I have 40 employees) and, with the immanent loss of traditional bankruptcy protection, our private health insurance system which is the least cost-efficient system in the developed world will lead to an enormous, unanticipated growth in the Medicaid and welfare rolls?

[formernaderite]

4. It's simply amazing to me how the ill-informed undecided swing voter

has become more important than actually attracting the other half of the country that does not bother to come to the polls. Screw the centrists! Screw the undecideds! Screw the swing voter! Let's go after the NON-VOTERS who've never had anyone represent the issues they think are important.

[dsc]

7. I don't have much faith in non voters

I fail to see why non voters would be unified around a set of issues any more than swing voters are.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

8. Most Of The Scholarship Suggests There Is Very Little Difference

In The Views Of Voters And Non Voters...


http://www.igs.berkeley.edu/publications/par/July1999/HightonWolfinger.html

[AntiCoup2K4]

9. Many of the "non voters" stay away because this party has gone to "right"

...so while the DLC types drone on and on about the need to pander to the 10% in the mush-headed "middle", we have 50% of eligible voters not showing up at all.

But if we move back to the left and convince even a quarter of those people to vote, it would be a Diebold-resistant margin. And we'd probably still get most of the "mushy-middle" 10% anyway, simply for taking a stand on something. Because it's not as though those middle types are enthusiastic about the Bush/PNAC agenda. They just didn't see anything better being portrayed on the other side. Bill Clinton himself may have summed it up best when he said that people would rather be "strong and wrong" than weak and right.

[CTLawGuy]

11. The DLC

believes in the discredited median-voter theorem.

Basically it says that all voters are on a normally-distributed political spectrum, with most people in the middle and fewest people on the extremes. A left-wing candidate will win all votes from the point where she sits on the spectrum leftwards to the very extreme. A right wing candidate will get all votes to the right of where he sits. Thus, the candidate that can win the vote of the "median voter" (the voter in the exact middle of the distribution) will win the election. Thus the game is to move as close to the middle as possible.

There are many problems with the median voter theorem:
1. It assumes the electorate is fixed. It assumes that everyone who can vote will and those who don't vote cannot be convinced to vote.

2. It assumes that everyone to the candidate's extreme end will vote for him or her, no matter how far away he is from their views. It assumes there is no third party candidate to take their vote.

3. It assumes voters are normally distributed, which is probably not valid. I think in our country,the electorate is shifted to the right of normal.

4. It assumes that politics is binary. What about libertarians? They aren't moderate. You can't really put them in the middle.


From what I gather about swing voters, they are more practical than ideological. They tend to care more about their particular situation at that time rather than acheving an abstract goal. They tend to like personal characteristics more than issue stands, and they are less active in politics.

I think, to attract swing voters, you need to bring them to you. If you try to go to them, you will fail because they aren't really anywhere. Give them something that they think will benefit them present it strongly, even in the face of doubts.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

13. Some non-voters are just ignorant and apathetic, but I've known others

who were SO well-informed that they became totally cynical and took the attitude once summed up as "Don't vote; it only encourages them."