Imagine that the young Bill Clinton were running for Arkansas attorney general for the first time right now. Would he be running as a Democrat or as a Republican?
To make it through the Democratic primary he would need to swerve to the left. To make it through the Republican primary he would need to swerve to the right.
I don’t think he’d run at all. If you absolutely, positively demanded that I pick one or the other, I’d say that he’d still run as a Democrat because of the importance of issues of race to him but that he’d lose in the primary.
I think he’d move to Illinois.
Can’t see him signing the Norquist pledge.
Steve
I don’t get this notion that Democrats have moved left. I don’t see the evidence. We’re right of where we used to be on Foreign Policy, the same place we’ve always been on entitlements — setting aside the president’s most recent budget which moves right.
On social issues it’s the country that’s changed, not the party per se. Given that some Republicans now favor gay marriage and they all at least pay lip service on race and immigration, I don’t see how that would define the Democrats as moving left, it’s more like the GOP moving left. On spending we’ve actually cut the growth of spending overall, and on taxes we’re right where we’ve always been: we believe in progressive taxation.
Michael, my impression is that Democratic primary voters have moved left while Republican primary voters have moved right. It may also be the case that Republican primary voters are more like Republican voters, generally, than Democratic primary voters are like Democratic voters, generally, but I have no feeling for that.
It’s darned hard to provide incontrovertible proof of that since primary voters are more likely to limit which candidates can get on the ballot rather than which candidates get elected once they’re on the ballot.
The proof that I’d submit is that there are fewer centrist Congressman and senators in either party than there used to be.
Consider this graph for the Senate. I think it demonstrates what I’m talking about. I’ll see if I can line up something similar for the House.
Got it! Check out this graph of mean ADA ratings. The graph shows the range of ADA ratings and the mean ADA rating for each party by House of Congress. There’s a clear trend. Just as I said, Democrats are moving one way, Republicans the other.
One graph shows Senate Democrats more liberal in 1929. I’d tend to believe any graph that purports to report liberal/conservative leanings from the 20’s to the present is not relevant let alone reliable.
As for the ADA, who knows what metric they’re using? When I look at the actual issues under discussion — taxes, entitlements, health care, various social issues — I see quite a bit of a rightward move by the GOP since, say, Ike, but not much really since Reagan. They’re quite a bit dumber but stupidity and conservatism don’t have quite a 1 to 1 correlation.
As for Dems, I’d say we’ve moved right on economic issues. Our allegedly hyper liberal president hires people from Goldman-Sachs. Our liberal Congresspeople take money from Citi. Too big to fail? Still too big, and even bigger than before. God knows the top tax rate is far lower than it was at one time.
I don’t have a feel for Arkansas, but it looks they have a Democrat A.G., so I’m nor sure Clinton could have get elected there today. I suspect he would need to be (a) tough on law-and-order issues; (b) have populist social justice causes; and (c) reject national positions on social issues (he would be against gay marriage, immigration amnesty, gun control, etc.), at least until those issues could not harm him.
There is another option though, Clinton could have governed as a New Democrat and like some of his fellow Southerners, at the right time made an opportunistic switch to the Republican Party, which would give him the opportunity to reject all of the unpopular elements of the Democratic Party.
Beneath the experiment is the question of the extent to which a party can have a separate local or state identity that is not completely beholden to the national brand. I think that space for variation is shrinking.
@michael, I guess it depends on what you mean by “the Democrats.” The Democrats in the House have unquestionably moved far to the left, that is simply the result of losing the House by losing most of the swing seats. The core that is left is a pretty liberal core, though you may not know it because their votes are irrelevant.
There are a number of moderate Republicans I could identify, including my own Congressman, but their identity and effectiveness is concealed by the Hastert rule.
PD – on your last point, I think that’s exactly right. The story I see in that chart is actually one of stability in the Democratic Party. Especially if you focus on Northern Democrats, who now make up the vast bulk of Senate Democrats and a majority of House Democrats, the change in their views is almost nonexistent in the past 50 years.
And like Michael, I would also question the value of a chart that shows 1930s or 1970s era Democrats to be substantially more conservative than those now. On issues such as race and marriage equality, sure. But fiscal issues? The military? Even on gun control, which strongly reflects the interests of their northern, urban core, the Democratic leadership is amazingly cautious.
Basically, I don’t see the need to argue that both parties have the same problem, or are problematic in the same way. It flies in the face of reason. That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems in both parties, but they’re different kinds of problems.
Sorry, guess I meant your second to last point – we were writing at the same time.
Well, we’ve just had Democrats elected or re-elected to the Senate in Missouri, North Dakota, Indiana, Virginia, Florida and Montana. I’d argue that’s prima facie evidence that the Democrats haven’t gone far left.
The last GOP equivalent I can recall is Scott Brown in MA — who was then tossed out on his ear.
I’m not sure the Democrats have “moved left” but I think the liberal/progressive faction is a lot more powerful than it once was and they are generally the ones who control the party agenda.
If you look at the passage of the PPACA, for example, it was a fight between the liberal and moderate wings of the party with the liberals compromising just enough to barely get passage. In doing so, the party sacrificed its majority and the victims were moderates. I think it says something about the party power structure that the liberal faction was not only able, but also perfectly willing to make that sacrifice.
The ADA’s ratings are not mysterious and are based on actual voting records. If the self-described “America’s most experienced independent liberal lobbying organization, says that the Congressional Democrats have moved to the left, that’s good enough for me.
You can get a similar analysis from the ACU or any other like organization that I’m aware of.
Elections aren’t decided solely on ideology. It’s one candidate against another. The election you mentioned with which I’m most familiar pitted incumbent Claire McCaskill, a very known quantity in Missouri, against Tod Akin, who had succeeded in painting himself as an idiot. Combine incumbent’s advantage with McCaskill’s long experience in Missouri electoral politics and Akin’s relative naivete and you can explain Sen. McCaskill’s re-election without any recourse to ideology whatever.
Dave, I’m guessing you were trying to come up with this website previously – it seems to place the charts you linked to above in their proper context:
http://voteview.com/blog/?p=494
I don’t know how well it supports your view, however. The other site seems to have distorted the charts significantly. They also don’t seem to be based on ADA ratings, but rather DW-NOMINATE scores.
This point in particular supports what I was saying:
As does this:
Andy –
I think this is true compared to the 1990s, when the DLC was ascendant. I don’t think it’s true, however, compared to most of the previous decades. It’s not an accident, for instance, that the PPACA strongly resembles the healthcare bill Clinton tried to pass. He had a big effect in moving the party to the right compared to where it had been earlier.
The reference to “Southern Democrats” in some of these links is interesting, particularly in the House, where I thought there was only one “Southern (white) Democrat” left. At some point that term has got to be outdated.
Thanks, Tom. I stumbled across that particular chart when I was searching for Congressional ADA ratings. A bit more searching gave me the charts I was actually looking for.