The Monkey Cage

Some big assumptions at work here — like the existence of a coherent, stable, median, and single dimensionality.

Those don’t really exist in real world elections, only in the fantasy land of political science research.

Is this another reason for the irrelevance of ps? Working with lame and false paradigms that everyone in the field seems to agree upon? I think I hear Tom Coburn’s footsteps.

This graph shows self-placement on the left-right, i.e. it is not objective. Most extremist think they are moderate, and there are regional differences as well (a Tennessee “moderate” would be far to the right of the national average…)

With respect, Mr. Obama was propelled to victory by a gigantic revulsion of eight years of Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain’s failure to articulate a cogent path forward. Rather than aiming for the middle, Mr. Obama has abandoned his legislative agenda to the far left in Congress. Consequently, after a year, it is apparent the middle third of the electorate is as frightened of the far left as it was of the far right. We are a ship of fools steered by morons. Nothing is more important today than a reform of government itself.

Ideological self-placement is a notoriously noisy measure (see, eg, Ansolabehere et al 2008). And context matters, as Marton notes. As in my blog post, Dede Scozzafava probably considers herself a conservative (because she in her legislative context), but that doesn’t mean in a global sense she’s right.

A REALLY large chunk of Americans don’t fit into the ideological boxes that elite discourse focuses on. The graph you disply omits a very important category: the don’t knows, which make up a VERY large chunk. When you combine them with the “moderates” (a large chunk of whom are just trying to give an answer to a question that doesn’t really make sense to them), you get a large enough segment of people to make ideological arguments tenuous at best.

That said, the underlying logic is sound, because nominating a bunch of people who are way out to the right on issues is a losing proposition. Enthusiasm can help you win a special, off-year, or midterm election, but paleo-cons will find themselves in VERY deep trouble in 2012 with both a more “normal” cross section of voters and new ones at that (redistricting).

There’s an underlying assumption in the post that Tea Party members are by definition conservative and GOP. I don’t think that is automatically the case: this WSJ column makes an argument that their roots are more in populist movements like Perot’s Reform party than from the GOP, and they can as easily swing against the Republicans as the Democrats (depending on who is in power at the time).