Will angry moderates decide 2008?

[Pangloss]

Douglas Schoen is a pollster who has written a couple of books recently about angry and motivated voters. He invented the term "RAM" that you hear talked about a lot lately, which stands for "restless, anxious moderates". I think he suffers from some of the same perspective weirdness that a lot of pollsters have, but he does raise some interesting points.

 

His new book, Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System, went on sale last week, and looks fairly interesting. His previous book, The Power of the Vote: Electing Presidents, Overthrowing Dictators, and Promoting Democracy Around the World, went to paperback last month and was a bestseller, if memory serves. I've not read either book yet.

 

Schoen has an interesting op/ed piece in the Sunday Washington Post, which you can read here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/08/AR2008020803270.html

 

Couple interesting quotes that I think tie in with a lot of our discussions here:

 

Voters today aren't just fed up with the status quo; they're furious. In a Gallup poll last month, only 24 percent of Americans said they were satisfied with the state of the country -- one of the lowest readings ever recorded. And it's not just George W. Bush they're mad at. Public approval ratings for the Democratic-controlled Congress are even lower than the president's. According to a 2006 poll taken by my former firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, 61 percent of voters say the two major parties are failing, and a survey last year by the Republican pollster Frank Luntz showed that 81 percent of voters would consider voting for an independent this year.

 

You might think that the emergence of a potentially decisive bloc of disaffected voters would seize the attention of the two major parties. But they've been strangely oblivious to the RAMs' prodding. Consider Washington's response to the public's primary new concern, the stalling economy. <example snipped>

 

Both parties, in fact, seem largely unaware that a new group of passionate and frustrated voters with a distinctive set of concerns has emerged. Instead, strategists from both parties have continued to treat independents as either "soft Democrats" or "soft Republicans." But there's nothing soft about the mood now transforming American politics. Anger at the status quo is now so intense, the desire for bipartisan cooperation so palpable, that even stalwart Democrats and Republicans are beginning to behave like independent voters. These people have already shown signs of bucking the Democratic and Republican establishments. They've turned not into soft partisans but into RAMs. And come November, this group is virtually certain to determine the winner of the presidential race.

 

Wow! I think he's right on target, and really speaks to a lot of what I've been feeling. I think this is a big part of why Bill O'Reilly is so popular, for example, because he "looks out for the folks", though he could just as easily be called a "populist in name only" (PINO? lol).

 

Perhaps move revealingly, I think it speaks to what's been going on between Obama and Clinton in the Democratic race.

 

The most immediate beneficiary of the RAMs' dissatisfaction with American politics has, of course, been Barack Obama -- as shown on Super Tuesday, when he won in a swath of red states across the country. The Illinois senator's extraordinary challenge to Hillary Clinton, the spouse and political partner of the most popular and important Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, testifies to a widespread yearning for post-partisan problem-solving, even among Democratic stalwarts.

 

Makes sense. He also talks about the how this has played out in the Republican race -- clearly this explains at least part of McCain's rise. I've been saying for a while now that mainstream Republican voters don't WANT a religious conservative to represent them, and while that may seem like a lonely plea here at SFN, I can assure you that it is a very common complaint in the red states. This article seems to back that up. Amen, brother Schoen! (errr....)

 

But perhaps the best part is that he gives RAMs credit for wanting substance:

 

But the RAMs are looking for substance, not just style. They are tough-minded pragmatists who insist on confronting the intractable problems facing the country, such as winning the war on al-Qaeda, providing affordable and accessible health care to all, developing a real environmental and energy policy, and reforming entitlements. If the Democratic candidate ignores the restless moderates' desire for cooperation and fundamental, system-wide change, she (or he) will leave the door open to McCain, or perhaps even to a pragmatic third-party alternative such as Bloomberg.

 

Right on! To me that's what really characterizes this as more than just a typical voter mood swing. People are really asking for answers, not just "CHANGE". When they see a candidate is just saying something different in order to get elected, they sense that and quickly switch their allegiance, and that's why this election has been so astonishingly difficult to predict.