Here at TDS, we got very focused immediately after the November 2 election on analyzing the alleged impact of self-identified independents, who were widely (and often misleadingly) attributed with a decisive role in the outcome. We’ve published pieces on this subject by Andrew Levision, James Vega and myself (one of them channelling Ruy Teixeira!) just in the last few days.
But for those who have just become aware of the controversy over indies, a good empirically-based starting point might be a piece written by my Progressive Policy Institute colleague, Lee Drutman, which served as part of a PPI post-election forum on independents in which TDS Co-Editors Stan Greenberg and William Galston also participated (an audiotape is available here).

Drutman runs the numbers efficiently, but then gets down to the nub of the matter: defining true independents in a realistic way, as distinguished from Republican-leaning “independents” who’ve shared the GOP’s lurch to the Right; noting the impact of disparate turnout patterns for various demographic groups, which shaped the “independent” electorate as much as any other voting group; and then distinguishing the “performance” concerns (e.g., reaction to the bad economy) from the “policy” concerns that might guide future actions by the Obama administration.
He leaves plenty of room for argument over the exact influence of this or that factor, whether it’s structural, performance-based, or policy-based. But Drutman provides a solid baseline for discussion of this subject among all elements of the progressive coalition.

It’s axiomatic that the bad economic circumstances facing the country elevated economic over “values” concerns in the 2010 midterm elections. And it’s also reasonably clear that for all the talk about the “libertarian” Tea Party Movement, there is considerable overlap between the Tea Folk and what we think of as the Christian Right.
So there wasn’t a lot of talk about the religious views of Americns in the runup to November 2, or since then, aside from the strange alarms sent up here and there about the completely mythological but terrifying prospect of Sharia Law being imposed on non-Muslims.
Fortunately, TDS Co-Editor William Galston and columnist E.J. Dionne have published a paper for the Brookings Institution looking more deeply at the 2010 elections in a religious context, based in part on exit polling from the Public Religion Research Institute.
Much of the paper documents the relative occlusion of religious divisions in an election dominated by secular concerns:

Overwhelmingly, voters cast their ballots on the basis of economic issues, while the religious alignments that took root well before the economic downturn remained intact. Democrats lost votes among religiously conservative constituencies, but also among religious liberals and secular voters. They did not, however, lose ground among African-Americans of various religious creeds and held their own among Latino voters. To see issues related to religious or cultural issues as central to the 2010 outcome is, we believe, a mistake.

Galston and Dionne go on to document the low status of traditional faith-based “values” issues like abortion and same-sex marriage today amog conservatives, even conservative white evangelicals, as compared to concerns about the size and role of government. They may not, I would observe, sufficiently recognize the extent to which complaints about “big government” or appeals to constitutonal originalism have long been part of the Christian Right’s rhetorical aresenal, reflecting a strong antagonism to “judicial activism” on behalf of abortion or gay rights. But it’s true that non-economic grounds for anti-government sentiments are generally in the background at present.
But Galston and Dionne provide some fascinating new data and analysis of a growing rift within the ranks of Christian conservatives over what has in the past been called “compassionate conservatism”–a faith-grounded tendency to reconcile conservative views with opennness to racial minorities and particularly immigrants, along with selected government activism in areas like urban social services and education.

Perhaps most revealing is the fact that Tea Party supporters were significantly more likely than either white evangelicals or self-described Christian conservatives to see government as playing too large a role vis-à-vis religious or private charities. Among Tea Party members, 82 percent took this view, but only 64 percent of Christian conservatives did – and, as we have seen, only 60 percent of white evangelicals. It is fair to conclude, we think, that while the ideas that fell under the heading “compassionate conservatism” still have some resonance among white evangelicals and Christian conservatives, such ideas are largely rejected by members of the Tea Party movement.

This shouldn’t come as big surprise to anyone aware that the common accusation that George W. Bush and Karl Rove had “betrayed conservative principles” frequently revolved around opposition to urban do-gooding (including minority homeownership initiatives on which many conservatives now blame the housing meltdown), No Child Left Behind, and comprehensive immigration reform.
In some respects, then, the Tea Party Movement is less a revolt of secular-minded libertarians against the Christian Right than a revolt of a segment of the Christian Right against certain “liberal” applications of faith, most notably a welcoming attitude towards immigrants and a feeling of religious solidarity with Muslims.
The potential size of this rift, Galston and Dionne suggest, is illustrated by PRRI exit poll data from the 2010 Colorado governor’s race, in which anti-immigration ultra Tom Tancredo ran on the Constitution Party ticket after the GOP nominee’s campaign fell apart:

White evangelicals gave Tancredo only 54 percent of their ballots, but strong Tea Party supporters gave him 80 percent of theirs. This 80 percent figure was also substantially larger than the 66 percent he received among self-described conservatives. We believe that what might be called the “Tancredo Difference” has important implications for conservative and religious politics. While many accounts have emphasized the possibility of splits in the Republican Party between its “establishment” and the Tea Party, there is the potential for other divisions between religious conservatives with more moderate views on immigration and more compassionate views on poverty and members of a Tea Party movement still rebelling against certain distinctive aspects of the Bush presidency.

Given the considerable overlap between the Tea Party Movement and the Christian Right, another way to put this phenomenon is that the Christian Right itself may be moving away from those irenic tenets associated with “compassionate conservatism,” and towards a hard-core comprehensive conservatism rooted in anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant nationalism
In any event, the current dominance of secular issues should not lure progressives into a new decade of happy ignorance about the religious and cultural underpinnings of American politics. They have not gone away.

We’ve been conducting an examination this week of the much-discussed proposition that Democrats got waxed on November 2 because self-identified independents were either “moving to the right” or perceived the Obama administration and the Democratic Party as “moving to the left.”
Yesterday I presented Ruy Teixeira’s analysis of the composition of the 2010 electorate, which showed that the number of true independents was much smaller than often assumed, and that their conservatism has been exaggerated. Today I’d like to point to John Sides’ demonstration at that valuable political science site, The Monkey Cage, which provided a simple alternative explanation of why true indies “flipped” between 2006 and 2010.
Here’s his conclusion:

I’ll state this baldly: voters — independent or otherwise — do not put political process ahead of outcomes. Partnerships with the GOP might be nice if Obama wants to sign a few bills into law, but despite the lip service that voters pay to compromise, bipartisanship is far down their list of priorities.
Here’s a counterfactual to ponder. What if Obama and the Democratic Congress had rammed through a $2 trillion stimulus, failing to garner a single GOP vote, but then the stimulus somehow reduced unemployment to 6%? Do you think independents would be offended by the lack of bipartisanship?
In fact, the relationship between the economy and elections it is stronger among independents than among partisans. Partisans are happy to vote for their party under most any circumstance and often rationalize their view of the economy accordingly.

In other words, true independents tend to vote against the party in power when the economy is bad, regardless of the perceived ideology or partisanship of the party in power. It happened in 2006 and it happened again in 2010. Arguing, as some have done, that the answer for Democrats is to “move to the center” and find some way to work with Republicans makes sense only if such steps contribute to an improvement in the performance of the economy. If they don’t, then it’s not the right direction to take, particularly if you consider the costs in terms of sacrificing progressive policy goals and making the Democratic elements of the electorate unhappy precisely on the eve of the cycle when they can be expected to return to the polls.

It’s become fairly commonplace to observe that Sarah Palin’s political influence is based on a mastery of contemporary media, from Fox to Facebook, or that her celebrity is more akin to that of a television star than a garden-variety pol. But who knew we’d see such a literal validation of these judgements so soon?
Sarah Palin’s new reality show on TLC is a ratings phenomenon for the basic cable channel. Meanwhile, her daughter Bristol has made the finals of the major network favorite, Dancing With the Stars, despite relatively poor marks from the professional judges on the show. Bristol has not only learned to dance this year; she’s also picked up some of her mother’s talent for turning criticism into populist resentment, viz. her bitter complaints about suggestions that her mother’s fans are stuffing the ballot box to keep her on the show.
Meanwhile, we hear the first credible report that Palin (mother, not daughter) is seriously considering a presidential run for 2012.
Well, why wouldn’t she? She’s already broken all the rules for advancement in politics by resigning her one major office in order to focus on her television and personal appearances career, without consequences. A significant minority of Americans (including perhaps a majority of very active conservative Republicans) appear to identify with her so viscerally that every mistep she makes becomes just another opportunity to shake a fist at her detractors. A presidential run, if it failed, would provide material for books, movies and testimonials lasting for decades (tales of the disrespect she had to put up with in 2008 are getting a little stale, after all).
I can’t imagine what it’s like in the media celebrity bubble where Palin now resides, but it doesn’t strike me as a place where a decent sense of proportion or gritty political realism is very prevelant. So yes, she’ll probably run, and those who can’t bear the sight and sound of her had better settle down for a long and painful ride.

Despite all of the GOP bluster about repealing the Affordable Care Act, the data suggests that such a campaign could boomerang badly, according to TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira, who explains in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,’

…Not only are they likely to fail to achieve their goal but they also are likely to become very unpopular in the process. This is because most parts of the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, are actually quite popular and any attempt to repeal them could very well turn public sentiment against the repeal advocates.
Consider these data from the latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll. The poll tested public support for repealing six elements of ACA and found strong majority support for retaining five of the six elements: tax credits for small business to offer health care coverage (78 percent keep to 18 percent repeal); closing the Medicare prescription drug doughnut hole (72 percent keep to 22 percent repeal); providing financial help for those who don’t get insurance through their jobs (71 percent keep to 24 percent repeal); no denial of insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions (71 percent keep to 26 percent repeal); and increasing the Medicare payroll tax on upper-income Americans (54 percent keep to 39 percent repeal). Only the individual mandate was not supported.

Many repeal advocates also have doubts, explains Teixeira:

…Even among those who say all or parts of ACA should be repealed support runs strong for four of the six elements tested: 68 percent for the small business subsidies; 62 percent for prohibiting denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions; 60 percent for closing the doughnut hole; and 55 percent for individual subsidies.

Given the aforementioned data, It seems likely that calls for HCR repeal will morph into “amend, don’t repeal” among many Republicans who value their jobs. As Teixeira explains, “Repealing ACA means taking away key reforms that have very broad public support. And that is likely to displease the public greatly no matter what conservatives think.”