You could figure this out by just reading the genesis of commentary on The Moderate Voice:
Two weeks before midterm elections, Republicans are losing the battle for independent voters, who now strongly favor Democrats on the major issues facing the country and overwhelmingly prefer to see them take over the House in November, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
One reason: many independent voters are concluding that divided government is more effective and more in keeping with check-and-balances democracy as established by our founding fathers.
Independents are poised to play a pivotal role in next month’s elections because Democrats and Republicans are basically united behind candidates of their own parties. Ninety-five percent of Democrats say they will support Democratic candidates for the House while slightly fewer (88 percent) Republicans said they plan to vote for their party’s candidates.
Some GOPers like to dismiss independent voters as closet Democrats. But history shows they went for various candidates such as Ronald Reagan, to some degree for George Bush, and most recently in California for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ahnold lost them after he was elected and veered to the right but after his special initiatives were virtually repudiated at the polls he return to wooing independent voters — and is now expected to win by a whoppingly huge margin. MORE:
The independent voters surveyed said they plan to support Democratic candidates over Republicans by roughly 2-to-1 (59 percent to 31 percent), the largest margin in any Post-ABC News poll this year. Forty-five percent said it would be good if Democrats recapture the House majority while just 10 percent said it would not be. The rest said it would not matter.
The poll also found that independents are highly pessimistic because of the Iraq war and the overall state of the country. Just 23 percent said the country is heading in the right direction compared to 75 percent who say things have gotten off track. Only a quarter of independents approve of the job Congress has done this year and only a third believe the Iraq war has been worth fighting.
Independent voters may strongly favor Democrats, but their vote appears motivated more by dissatisfaction with Republicans than by enthusiasm for the opposition party. About half of those independents saying they plan to vote Democratic in their district said they were doing so primarily to vote against the Republican candidate rather than affirmatively for the Democratic candidate. Just 22 percent of independents voting for Democrats are doing so “very enthusiastically.”
We have long maintained that if the GOP suffers a major defeat at the polls, it will be because many independent voters cast protest votes against the elite leadership of the GOP — and their attempts to mold it into a new form of Republicanism that has upset Goldwater style Republicans and even members of the first President Bush’s administration.
And if the GOP wins? It will show that the “mobilization” (of the base to win) style election is the effective new style of American politics and that traditional political science teaching about the need to aggregate political interests is just so 20th century…
BE SURE TO READ OUR CO-BLOGGER ELROD’S EXCELLENT POST ON THIS ISSUE.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.