This week, furious speculation has attended the switch of Senator Arlen Specter from the Republican to the Democratic Parties in his quest for reelection in 2010. Columnist E.J. Dionne has suggested that this event ratifies a decisive shift in “American politics”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/28/AR2009042802735.html. Pundits and politicians have been musing about the significance of the switch, predictably either greatly inflating its importance, or discounting it, according to their own politically-motivated wishful thinking.
Notably, however, for all the discussion of the gains in Democratic party identification in Pennsylvania and nationally, this trend may be leveling off, signaling a more temporary shift than many have come to believe. Intriguing recent evidence appears in a Pew Research Center “summary”:http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1207/republican-party-identification-slips-nationwide-pennsylvania-specter-switch of recent polling trends posted on Wednesday (4/29).
One of the key findings in this set of surveys is that once we move beyond November 2008, the Democrats begin to lose ground again. The key graphic is here:
Republicans, to be sure, are also in decline. But it appears that these Republican losses are not to Democrats, but to the ranks of a rising bloc of independents — which in this case includes weak partisans. This is an important set of facts to reckon with as we review the 2008 election and interpret its meaning.
The bad news for Republicans is that their losses may not have bottomed out, according to the above figures (bearing in mind that these are estimates with a margin of error that could either flatten out the trend or make it steeper). The good news for Republicans is that these weak partisans and independents are exactly the people that will drift back when political circumstances change. The move from Republican to independent is not as grave for the GOP as a more drastic move from Republican to Democratic. I suspect that if we had a longer series in these graphs, we would almost certainly see that the Republicans have been in this position before, just as Democratic fortunes have waxed and waned, suggesting nothing like a permanent shift.
The Pew research also estimates that Democratic party identification in Pennsylvania is back to where it was in 2004, after a notable surge last year, and that GOP losses may even be leveling off there. Independent identification is on the rise, as it is nationally.
This research definitely speaks to the provocative political science paper authored by David Brady, Doug Rivers and Laurel Harbridge, appearing late last year in “_Policy Review_”:http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/35390034.html. In this interesting paper, the authors suggest that the partisan changes from 2004 to 2008 indicate a fundamental shift in party loyalties that could well be permanent and lasting. Parroting much conventional wisdom, they fault the Republicans for taking overly conservative positions on issues such as gay rights, gun control and abortion. This was a familiar line echoed this week in reference to the Specter switch: social conservative capture of the GOP is leading it into permanent minority status.
The Pew data begin to cast doubt on how lasting this shift will be. Notably, the Brady, Rivers and Harbridge paper shows that most of the partisan movement is among weaker partisans, with far more weak Republicans having moved toward the Democrats than weak Democrats moved toward the Republicans. The question is how long will these ‘drifters’ stay there. They are _weak_ partisans precisely because they aren’t highly committed to party stands and positions.
We can gather that weak Democrats are not hopelessly beyond the reach of Republican appeals anymore than weak Republicans were beyond the reach of Democratic appeals in 2006 and 2008. We will need additional months of polling on party identification, to say nothing of another election or two, to know for sure whether 2008 signals a permanent shift. Meanwhile, it does not appear quite as hopeless for the GOP as some have suggested — or at least it could be much worse.