Obama’s Swing Voters

After Mitt Romney’s victory in Nevada, we seem closer to the general-election contest widely predicted from the outset: Romney vs. Obama. There are a few recent articles and reports out from Gallup and from center-left thinkers and think tanks that are worth reading if you want to begin to understand the challenges Obama will face this year in winning over swing voters, the shrinking but still vital lump of the electorate that decides Presidential elections.

To understand the overall political landscape, this January Gallup survey is a good place to start. The headline says “Record-High 40% of Americans Identify as Independents in ’11,” but the most important fact in the report is that most self-identified independents actually vote consistently for one party or another. When this fact is taken into account, the Republicans and Democrats each have about forty-five per cent of voters on their side. That leaves just ten per cent of voters as genuine independents, those who are realistically open to voting for either party.

In The New Republic Bill Galston looks at a decade of polling data and notes how uniformly conservative the Republican Party is now. Using this Gallup data, he points out that both parties have become more ideologically homogenous. Since 2000, the percentage of Republicans self-identifying as “conservative” has increased nine points (from sixty-two to seventy-one), while the percentage of Republicans self-identifying as “moderate” has decreased eight points (from thirty-one to twenty-three). As Galston notes, “A candidate running on George W. Bush’s agenda of twelve years ago could not win the Republican nomination today.”

While the percentage of Democrats who describe themselves as liberal has also increased since 2000, rising ten points, the Democratic Party remains much more ideologically diverse than the G.O.P. Roughly forty per cent of Democrats call themselves “liberal,” forty per cent call themselves “moderate,” and twenty per cent call themselves “conservative.”

“Such numbers explain why liberals seem destined to perpetual disappointment in Democratic presidents, who cannot lean too far left without alienating the party’s moderate-to-conservative majority,” Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute argues in a recent report.

So, if moderates are still crucial to Obama’s election, what do they look like? Over at Third Way, Michelle Diggles and Lanae Erickson take a deep dive into the data to show that the real swing vote for Obama is a group they call Obama Independents—voters who “liked and voted for [Obama] just 3 years ago… were the most ideologically moderate segment of the electorate,” and “are true swing voters, with one-quarter voting Republican in 2010 and one-quarter voting for President Bush in 2004.” This group, which we are likely to hear a lot about in the coming months, is disproportionately young, female, and secular, and it was hit hard by the recession. One quarter of its members are non-white.

By all means, check out all five of these links. There’s a wealth of data and insights about the current political landscape that is far more informative than much of the horse-race analysis of the current Romney-Gingrich battle.

Photograph by Roger Cremers/Hollandse Hoogte.