Our political Quote of the Day comes from one of the best commentators on the scene, The Atlantic’s (and soon to be The National Journal’s) Marc Ambinder who notes that a big chunk of the electorate are conservatives so the GOP is looking to get 80 percent of the conservatives to the polls for the mid-terms. Another chunk are “self-described” moderates (and as we have noted here moderates can be center, center-left and center-right). He writes:
The ideological sorting of the American electorate is basically at an end now, and demographic changes are beginning to exert more influence. The future demographic composition of the electorate — less white, for one thing — is an indicator of long-term success for Democrats.
But so long as there are enough white conservatives, and, in off-years, older white conservatives, and so long as Republicans can ways of exciting them, Republicans will remain competitive in congressional elections where less than half of eligible Americans turn out…and less so, relatively, in presidential elections, when the composition of the actual electorate matches the composition of the potential electorate.
Why did Democrats take a beating for passing a health care bill that was very similar in form to what Republican intellectuals had been urging for more than a decade? Because the Tea Party, conservative independents and Republicans have moved the political center to the right–marginally on a 0 to 100 scale, but enough to tip the scale away from Democrats. The electoral environment favors economic libertarians, and the Tea Party movement (or the conservative movement) has organized itself in such a way that really excites conservatives, while liberals, at a disadvantage ideologically (in the sense that conservatism has always been more organized and less diverse) cannot, as they did in 2008, build a tent around a larger coalition.
In other words: it’s yet one more pundit show predicts there will very unhappy Democrats and an unhappy White House on election day (although not everyone agrees).
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.