It’s a common practice in DC pundit world to interchangeably use the words Independent, Moderate, and Center, as if they all refer to the same thing. David Broder,I’m looking at you. But this just isn’t the case, plain and simple. Below I show why while taking the new DailyKos/PPP polling data for a test drive.
In the graphic below we see a distribution of party and ideology, including the Tea Party. Two things are immediately clear: almost half of Moderates are Democrats, and Independents are not just Moderates, but include a large number of Conservatives. In other words, if you look at Independents to find out what Moderates think, you’re looking too far to the right.
Here’s another way to look at it: percent of each party that is Moderate versus Conservative.
As the Beltway would have it, Independents are the home of Moderates. If this were true, the bubble for Independents should be in the upper left corner of this graph, sitting above the bubble for Democrats, and the bubble for Democrats should be much lower.
We can also immediately tell that the Tea Party is less Moderate than the Republicans. From the first graph, we also see that the Tea Party is not a subset of the Republican Party; rather, it is (mostly) a subset of Conservatives.
Here’s yet another way to look at the data, that lets us explicitly see the third ideology: Liberal.
In this kind of graph, the lower-left hand corner would be the home of a Liberal party. The lower-right hand corner is the home of a Conservative party – Tea Party. And, the mythical Moderate party should be sitting right at the top of the triangle. Which the Independents are not.
What we do see is that the Democrats are a Moderate-Liberal party, balanced by the Moderate-Conservative Independents, and Conservative Republicans and Tea Party are down in the corner. This means the composition of the entire electorate together is in Moderate-Conservative territory, although more Liberal than Independents.
Wait, what?? It’s a center-right nation?
What’s In a Name?
Not so fast. The question is, are Moderates all moderate in their political leanings? Is an Independent Conservative the same beast as a Republican Conservative? Let’s take a look at a political hot-button issue with very strong liberal-conservative distinctions: gay marriage.
This shows us results from the latest DailyKos/PPP poll on gay marriage split amongst eight categories of ideology and party (sorry, too few Liberal Republicans for any meaningful data). The error bars are large but that’s okay because we’re just looking for clusters. And that’s exactly what we see: clusters by ideology, but not by party. The reds (Conservatives) are all close together, as are the greys (Moderates) and blues (Liberals). Note especially the triangles (Independents) are spread out from one side of the graph to the other. In other words, Conservative Independents really are similar in their views to Conservative Republicans, and Moderates are all similar too. So far this only validates the view that it's a center-right nation...
Here’s another triangle graph (I’ve included the small number of ‘Don’t Know’ responses in the ‘Civil Union’ category as this response represents a viewpoint that is not at either extreme – if you’re at one extreme or the other, you’re certain in your response).
Here we see Liberals sitting snuggly in the left corner, Moderates sitting in the center-left portion of the triangle, and Conservative sitting in the center-right. In other words (please take note, beltway gang), the all-mighty Moderates have center-left opinions in the case of gay marriage. While the electorate may be Moderate-Conservative, the Moderates themselves are center-left.
This means the electorate as a whole is pretty much smack in the center on this question in the DailyKos poll(split three ways). Let me emphasize this: on one of the most hot-button cultural issues of the day, the electorate is in the middle. Not the center-right. Not only that, we’re moving towards the lower left corner. Here’s a plot from the CBS/NYT polls over the last decade or so:
Interaction of Party and Ideology
So in the graph above, we see that Party does not unite people so much as Ideology when it comes to an issue. What about political opinion? Here, Party plays a much bigger role. For instance, Obama’s approval rating is about 20% among Moderate Republicans but 80% among Moderate Democrats. Variation within party is much less than variation within ideology.
Here’s a graph that shows this, and Tea Party identification, to bring us back to the first part:
So, even though Moderate Republicans don't go for the Tea Party so much, it's not because they're big Obama supporters - their (dis)approval of Obama is only a little more than their Conservative Republican fellows.
The Upshot
So, Conservative Independents are truly right-wing, and don't like Democrats. Democrats probably can never lurch far enough to the right to capture many of their votes (although they may try). Moderate Republicans may be reachable if they lose party loyalty - say, if their party nominates somebody they find abhorrent. Moderate Independents look like a good place to find votes. Either way, Democrats would have to align themselves with the interests of Moderates, NOT Independents - in this case, center-left policies. So, for future DailyKos policy questions - keep your eyes on the moderates.
Notes
I weighted all data from the DailyKos/PPP poll by age before analysis, just as they do for ‘official’ numbers (16%/28%/37%/19%). I found it surprising that the raw data had such wild gyrations in age distribution though. The poll from the first week of January had 54% age 65+. The poll from the second week had 36% age 65+. As a new year starts and families get back into routines, a change might be expected, but that seemed kind of drastic. It will be interesting to watch over time.
I was also amused by respondent number 770 of the second week’s poll, who was a liberal Tea Party member who approved of violence and Obama. She also was a poor, young, Hispanic Democrat from the Northeast. In other words, somebody pressed ‘1’ in answer to every question. There were also only a couple dozen cases where somebody, intentionally or not, pressed a number higher than 4 (aside from the income question).
Pre-published update: brooklynbadboy covered similar territory on Wednesday.
