I just made a comment in a thread warning against holding too hard a line in caucus negotiations because, as I put it, the Blue Dogs are perfectly happy to see nothing pass, so voting against a bill because it's 'not progressive enough' and having it fail is not an outcome they're scared of- it is, in fact, a victory for them. I'm going to use this to flesh out that comment, and I'm going to use a strange assist here- an internet dating site.
OkCupid has a lot of data about people. And apparently some good math folks. Their blog has a long, detailed analysis I'd expect to see on FiveThirtyEight, and I highly recommend everyone go take a look.
It really is a phenomenal collection of work.
I want to highlight a couple parts, but go read the whole thing, I beg you. We can leverage our majority effectively, but it requires us to be informed about what we're dealing with so we know how to use it.
The graph above was made by taking extensive measurements on a 2 dimensional political graph, social liberalism on one axis, economical liberalism on the other. Points are age markers. While this is a measurement of multiple people, possibly showing generational effects, they reference exit polls from previous elections to make a reasonable case that the 'average' person goes through the same general evolution through their life. The slope of the line dividing the party also changes, it's weighted against whether social or economic issues are more important to the same 'average' person at that time in their life, hence the overlap in the cask hulls.
The analysis:
As you can see, the Democrat's base is much larger. And the range of political values it encompasses is vast.
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Yes, a political party that's this wide-open is probably a more intellectually stimulating organization to be a part of, and it has a lot more potential power. But bigger base is also just that many more competing viewpoints Democratic politicians must cater to and that many more different viewpoints in play among the actual elected officials themselves.
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Also, well over half of the Democratic party's hull lies outside of its upper-right-hand ideological home, implying that you've got many groups of people who might tend Democratic, but who have disagreements with the party on particular issues and could defect, should the slant of the party or the country tilt the wrong way. On the other hand, the Republicans are concentrated in the lower-left-hand corner. This red cluster has multiple, apparently self-reinforcing, reasons to vote with their party, giving the Republicans both a more fervent power base and a little more ideological wiggle-room along either the social or economic axis.
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So when you read about the thousands of Catholic nuns who recently came out in favor of health care reform, it's easy to get excited about being a Democrat. But do you think those same people will side with us on things like gay marriage? Or abortion rights? Hull no!
The self-reinforcing views are also key. They put it in graph form:
Social Liberals vs Social Conservatives on abortion. About what you expect, given what you know. But when applied to Economic Liberals to Economic Conservatives?
Liberals are all over the place. While Conservatives, of any stripe, tend to agree. They then go on to repeat the exercise with gay marriage:
On this issue the Economic Conservatives are more spread out then they were on abortion, but look at the Economic Liberals- It's almost a flat line. There's next to no cohesion between them and the Social Liberals.
One final graph I'll cover here, showing how well people on the spectrum match with each other (it is a dating site, after all):
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Republicans like each other. They agree, even when not talking about politics. Democrats, on the other hand, are mostly scattered in the 55% range. They don't tend to like each other, even on issues outside of politics.
Being a big tent has many, many advantages. But we need to know how to use this. Running the same type of strategy as the Republicans have is just not going to cut it, and it's going to piss away a lot of effort for very little results. We need to leverage what we have, not try to copy what our opponents implemented.
I don't know quite how to do that, but as we've seen, we have a wide variety of minds on this side- someone will know how.