Pew Typologies, part 2

(This is an addition to the previous post, which I suggest you read first.)

Some of the most important findings  of the Pew typologies concern the growing number of non-partisan voters. This group (people who actually vote but don’t self-identify with either party) has grown substantially in recent years (from 30% to 37% since 2005). But it is not simply a growing pool of centrists who would like to split the parties’ differences. Instead, non-partisans include three separate groups with distinct ideological views, some of which are more staunch than the main bodies in either party. This means that simply being the most centrist candidate in the election won’t be enough to ensure the support of these crucial swing voters.

A pollster in Arizona shared similar findings with me a few months ago. He suggested that this was the single most important trend in Arizona politics over the last thirty years, but also one that was poorly understood by either political party. This latter point was a simple matter of institutional behavior: parties self-definition usually comes from those who win party primaries to become the candidates, office holders, and party officials. But there is absolutely zero incentive within the primary process to appeal to those who have opted out of the party.

Only rarely are those who win a party primary also well-situated to appeal to centrist voters. Instead, centrists either vote for the least-unpleasant option or don’t vote at all, allowing the ideologues to continue running government. This is especially true in states like Arizona where one party enjoys a significant advantage in the number of dedicated partisans. Only when particular circumstances or issues motivate the non-partisans en masse do they provide the crucial difference in swinging the election one way or another. Then the victorious party often makes the assumption that they’ve somehow permanently won over a new majority, only to find themselves abandoned at the next election. (Sound familiar to anyone?)

The ideologically diverse makeup of the non-partisan voter pool complicates matters further. The Arizona pollster noticed more self-identifying liberals and conservatives who nonetheless refused to identify with one party or another. I suspect that he was really seeing what the Pew Research Center report found: a pool of very ideological voters whose beliefs don’t fit neatly with either party’s ideological configuration. The Pew report gave these groups new names, but individual voters being surveyed likely fell back on the familiar terms of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ (and, less commonly, ‘libertarian’) even though those terms didn’t actually fit them particularly well.

These political realities help explain why someone like Gary Johnson (more here and here), who presumably could lead a 10% core of the voting population (Libertarians, as classified by the Pew Report) and appeal broadly to other groups, is instead likely to be a barely-remembered has-run in the Republican primary. This is especially true because he’s up against Ron Paul, whose social views are much more in line with Staunch Conservatives and Main Street Republicans who are likely to vote in the GOP primaries.