Charlie Cook: Swing Voters’ Shift Back to Center Worries Republicans

Charlie Cook
Charlie Cook
In late February, Charlie Cook, the respected pollster and political analyst, downplayed the possibility that Dems could win back the House in 2012:

I would be surprised if either party picked up or lost more than 10 seats, something like that. Democrats need a 25 seat net gain to get their majority back in the House. And I think that’s awfully hard. They may pick up five or 10; they may lose five or 10. I don’t see a lot of change in the House of Representatives right now.

Based on current trends and past performance — the record of the parties’ gains and losses in the House in past presidential elections — chances that Democrats will take back the House next year remain statistically unlikely.

But statistics have their limits as predictors. Events — natural disasters, wars, economic downturns and the like — can change the political landscape seemingly overnight, as can human folly and hubris.

Now, in a column published in the National Journal this week, Cook says recent developments, particularly in the tea party-controlled U.S. House, are starting to worry top Republicans:

Among the worries the party now has is that a government shutdown could get blamed on the GOP. Additionally, these party insiders believe that taking on entitlements, specifically Medicare, could jeopardize the party’s hold on the House, its strong chances of taking the Senate and the stronghold that the party has been established with older white voters — not coincidentally, Medicare recipients.

The problem, says Cook, is that while the freshman tea partyites have been schooled by their party leaders about the risks of blowback from swing voters, the tea party rank and file — the “cut it or shut it” folks — back in their districts are having none of it.

This disconnect is a function of tea partyists’ exaggerated sense of their importance — a misapprehension that was fueled early on by fawning coverage in the “liberal” media. As a byproduct of this, it has become received wisdom that the tea party “won” the House last year.

That is not what happened. In broad strokes, the midterm vote broke down roughly this way: 95 percent of both Democrats and Republicans voted for their parties’ candidates, while swing-voting independents tilted toward GOP candidates by close to 60/40 percent.

Laboring under the misapprehension that they won the House, tea partyists now believe they have a mandate to run the government as they see fit.

While the tea party rank and file may be suffering from delusions of grandeur, the Republican establishment understands the reality facing the party — which Cook describes like this:

[For] independent voters, the 2010 elections were not about slashing government spending; rather, they were a reaction to what they saw as an over-reach by President Obama and the Democratic Congress.

These between-the-40-yard-line-voters didn’t like the economic stimulus package, climate change legislation or health care reform. They voted against Democrats and what Democrats were trying to do, but they did not embrace the budgetary slash-and-burn politics that is the embodiment of the tea party movement.

The disparity between the views of the GOP base and independent voters couldn’t be stronger.

Look no further than late February’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted by Democrat Peter Hart and Republican Bill McInturff.

On the question, “Do you think government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people or do you think government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals?” 75 percent of Republicans thought government was trying to do too much while 27 percent thought government should do more.

But among independents, 51 percent thought government should do more, with 47 percent saying government was trying to do too much.

While those numbers among independents are effectively tied, they are a far cry from the 60-38 percent of independents who thought government was trying to do too much in the mid-October, preelection poll and a lot more like the numbers that existed in spring 2009…

That 60/40 ratio in October among independent swingsters who thought the government was doing too much turned out to be a precise predictor of the swing vote in favor of the GOP in November.

Now it has righted itself, or rather, centered itself, 47-51 — and that, in part, is what has the GOP establishment worried.

Still, Cook is not ready to predict a pendulum swing back to the Dems in 2012:

It is much too early to suggest that the Republican majority in the House is in danger, but the sequence of events that Democrats would need to have a legitimate chance are so far looking increasingly plausible.

And yet there are recent precedents in the data to suggest it remains possible.

“Keep in mind the volatility we have seen in the three previous elections,” Cook writes. “Independent voters swung heavily in favor of Democrats in 2006 and 2008. In 2010, those same independent voters went in the opposite direction to push Republicans forward. If something happens in three consecutive elections, who wants to say that a fourth time is inconceivable?”

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