A for real academic article: Etch-a-Sketching: Testing the Post-Primary Moderation Hypothesis

The previous post links to it.

- Click here to check it out.

Its commonly assumed that candidates for the presidency - and by extension any office that involves a primary - have to moderate their stances on issues in order to win general elections. The rule of thumb is that candidates campaign to either extreme in order to win their party's nomination. This id because party identifiers dominate the primaries, but they are only a minority of voters in the general election. Extreme position do not help in general elections, so moderation is necessary.

But is this in fact true?

The author finds evidence that it is.

Here's his conclusion:

This research project moves American political research forward in two major ways. First, the research provides the first systematic evidence for the academic and popular intuition behind a substantial moderation in candidate messages after the primary campaign. By employing text analytic tools, this research gains leverage on a question that evaded empirical measurement for decades. Second, and perhaps more excitingly, this approach opens a new and fruitful area for future study. It remains an open question how well voters may, or may not, perceive subtle rhetorical differences. As with any campaign message, the fact that candidates seem to carefully craft their ideological moderation may not mean that the strategy has much of an effect on voters.

Romney's move to the center ok with conservative leaders.

From Dana Milbank:

Key to the success of Romney’s Etch a Sketch movement has been the cooperation of conservatives, who have been unusually docile in the face of the candidate’s heresies: pledging not to enact a tax cut that adds to the deficit, promising not to decrease the share of taxes paid by the wealthy, vowing not to slash education funding, praising financial regulations, insisting that he would make health insurers cover preexisting conditions and disavowing his earlier claim that 47 percent of Americans are parasites living off of the government.

At Tuesday night’s debate, Romney continued his sprint to the center. He took pains to say he is “so different” from George W. Bush. He asserted that “every woman in America should have access to contraceptives,” and, on immigration, he said the children of illegal immigrants “should have a pathway to become a permanent resident of the United States.” After a primary battle in which GOP candidates tried to out-tough each other on immigration, Romney said that he was in agreement with President Obama and that “I’m not in favor of rounding up people.”

The conservatives’ complicity seems to be driven by two things: a belief that Romney’s moves to the middle are mere feints, shifts more in tone than in substance; and an acceptance that Romney’s rhetorical reversals are necessary if he is to deny Obama a second term.

“I hear all this as tonal,” Grover Norquist, the Republican purity enforcer and keeper of the antitax pledge, told me. Romney’s new pledge that his tax cuts wouldn’t increase the deficit, for example, could be honored simply by using an alternative accounting method, known as “dynamic scoring,” that conservatives favor. “You’re now in the general election and you’ve already convinced conservatives why they should vote for you,” Norquist said of Romney. “You’re now talking to undecided voters, who have a completely different set of issues.”

From the Texas Tribune: GOP Candidates Walk Fine Line Between Primary, General

The following story hit on a point we will concentrate on more fully as we begin to discuss elections soon. In order to win primary elections, candidates have to earn the votes of party identifiers - which means they have to take relatively extreme ideological positions. But these positions can make them uncompetitive in the general election, where more moderate and independent voters are likely to turn out. So candidates have to moderate their tone accordingly if they want to win, but this might make them unpopular to the party base.

Its a delicate dance, the story points out that it is increasingly common in Texas elections:

In the primaries, Republican candidates in particular answer to their party’s purists and, in the general election, to everybody who votes.

The state’s political maps put most candidates in safe zones, where Republicans do not have to worry about moderate or liberal voters, and Democrats do not have to worry about moderates and conservatives. The rest have to get out of their primaries without committing to anything that will endanger them in November.

They have to walk a line, sticking with conservative colleagues on legislative votes, but doing it without imperiling their re-elections.

Members of Congress are familiar with that terrain, but on the scale that has partisanship on one end and local issues on the other, Texas legislative races used to skew toward the local.

Rubio helps GOP tack to the center

The Washington post reports on the Senator's proposal for an alternative Dream Act - which would offer chances for the children of illegal immigrants to become citizens. This is another example of the pivoting the party has to do in order to win the presidency, but its interesting that Romney is not doing it. He can embrace or reject it based on how it plays. Rubio is rumored to be on Romney's VP list.

Two questions:

1 - Will it be accepted by the party's base? Meaning, can Romney embrace the proposal and not lose the support of the party's right wing?

2 - Will it be accepted by the Latino population? Rubio's Cuban roots does not put him in the mainstream of the Latino community.

New Texas House District Map - Incumbents likely safe

Now that a federal court has overthrown the map the Texas Legislature drew for the Texas House in the spring, it has drawn a new one.

Related stories:
- First Reading: Map points to smaller GOP majority in Texas House.
- Texas Dems could gain seats under revised voting maps.

Ross Ramsey points out that, as with previous maps, this one is drawn to protect incumbents and guarantee that the winner in November will be the member of a specific party. The general election really doesn't matter that much in Texas:
. . . if recent political history is your guide, you know that a large number of incumbents won’t draw serious opposition even in a redistricting year. They’ll effectively be elected when filing closes. And unless the judges do something shocking to the election recipes (as opposed to some limited surgery to make the maps legal), most of the political districts will remain toxic to candidates from one party or the other.

Most of the Republican districts — nearly two-thirds in the maps drawn by the Legislature — are configured to be nearly impossible for Democrats or Libertarians or anyone other than Republicans to win. It’s the same with the Democratic districts — there are just fewer of them.

The people who represent those districts will effectively be chosen in March, in the party primaries. The November election will hold some surprises. It always does. But the real decision-making in Texas politics increasingly happens in March.

Will Republican Primary Battles Produce an Unelectable Candidate

While its still premature to make predictions, the state of the economy, and the looming possibility of a second recession make Obama's re-election unlikely, that is unless the Republican Party nominates someone too extreme for the general electorate.

Albert Hunt sees this as a possibility. From the Atlantic Five:

"One of the few political pleasures for President Barack Obama's re-election team these days is watching the Republican primary fight," writes Albert Hunt in Bloomberg View. Republican presidential candidates must appeal to conservatives further to the right on issues from Medicare to immigration, threatening to alienate independent voters in a general election.

"President Richard Nixon used to say that the key to U.S. politics was to appeal to the base in the primaries and move to the center in the general elections. That's difficult if the nomination contests swing too far," Hunt says. In debates, Rick Perry, seen as the "leading conservative," has been attacked for moderate positions on immigration, even while he leads conservative attacks on social security. Romney's greatest liability is "enacting a health-care plan when he was governor that most analysts say has improved care in Massachusetts."

"Primary battles can be beneficial. Obama's standing and skills as the Democratic nominee last time were honed by his intense battle for the nomination against Hillary Clinton. An exceptionally tough and protracted battle, it never became ideologically toxic." Reagan was a better candidate in 1980 having defeated his primary rivals. But primary fights have "caricatured" a party beyond general electability as with Barry Goldwater or George McGovern, Hunt says. If Chris Christie gets into the race, he can expect to have his more moderate positions on guns and immigration attacked on the right, increasing the likelihood of another Goldwater-esque candidacy in the general election.

Is it Realistic that a Viable Third Party Candidate Will Run, and Possibly Win, in 2012?

Friedman's Sunday article (post below) led to a rash of commentary wondering whether a third party could in fact run competitively in 2012, or govern in the off chance that they win. Nate Silver adds his two cents.

Are Tea Party Activists Pushing the Republican Party too Far to the Right?

We will only find out in upcoming general elections, but Dana Milbank thinks recent primary votes in Utah and Maine, along with the changes the activists are making to the party platform will pose problems for the party, if not in 2010, in the near future.

A Polarized Nation?

The current, hostile, political climate is leading some to speculate that party polarization is reaching news heights. In a response, this blogger does a great job of articulating the conflicting strategies used in primary vs. general elections.

Primary elections pull candidates to the extremes, general elections pull them back to the middle. That's the overall logic, how it plays out in a particular election is impossible to predict ahead of time.

The Tea Party Movement Set to Takeover the Republican Party

For 2301 mostly:

Here's a terrific story about how members of the tea party movement are working from the ground up to takeover the Republican Party, which they see as too "establishment" and "liberal" and ensure that it only promotes candidates they find acceptable.

It begins with taking over precinct chairs an works its way up from there. The only potential strategic problem is that they may, as has been observed before, pull the party so far to the right that it becomes less competitive in general elections. But perhaps the general population is more conservative than thought. It'll be interesting to watch.

Commentators often equate the tea partiers with populist movements, fueled by anger at elites (any elite). American history is peppered with such movements. A key question is going to be how long the movement can survive. All movements have life cycles. The establishment can be very patient.