Raging Centrist

 

The "raging centrist" in question is a market researcher called Rich Thau who is running a Swing Voter Project in six battleground states  (AZ, GA, FL, NC, PA, WI) for Axios, studying voters who went for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020 in monthly focus group meetings, who has gotten the attention of Paul Kane, Washington Post's congressional bureau chief, with his finding that these swingers don't want a Congress full of "mini-Trumps" but are "quite sour" on Democrats as well, who leave them "indifferent... mixed to indifferent.. bored... ambivalent... "

Even though they strongly back abortion rights and disapprove of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and don't blame Democrats for inflation, which they understand as a consequence of the fight against COVID-19, and really don't have a lot of ideas one way of the other about current policy debates (not well covered in their preferred news sources of local TV, CNN, Fox, and Facebook).

So of course inevitably Thau and his colleagues are "pleading" with candidates to "steer toward the middle".:

He’s part of a collection of researchers and pollsters who, despite the growing clamor for focusing on the turnout of base voters, have publicly pleaded for campaign operatives to understand the still-central importance of the shrinking number of truly independent voters.

Pollsters Joel Benenson, a Democrat, and Neil Newhouse, a Republican, have done similar work over the past two years for Center Forward, a centrist policy organization.

David Winston and Myra Miller, the heads of the Winston Group and advisers to House and Senate GOP leadership, send regular memos to Capitol Hill pleading with lawmakers to steer toward the middle to win races.

Even though the number of "truly independent voters" is "shrinking" and therefore literally less important in every cycle.

And what does that entail for Democrats exactly? Would it be more toward the middle these voters inhabit to be less in favor of abortion rights than they are? Or should we just be more outsidery because that's what they like in the center? Or should we be more anti-Putin because inflation is his fault or more pro-Putin in the hope of convincing him to stop it?

They almost all support abortion rights and disapprove of the Supreme Court’s June ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, Thau has found. They didn’t place much emphasis on abortion rights while voting for Trump in 2016 because they wanted an outsider who would shake things up.

Abortion animates their thoughts heading into the November elections, but inflation is also very central to their everyday stresses. Yet at the same time, this sliver of voters does not blame anyone in particular for high costs.

“They typically don’t go to Biden and the Democrats,” Thau said. “They will say that it’s the pandemic and all the spending that came out of the pandemic. It has to do with supply chains. It has to do with Putin and Russia.”

Or what? What does this even mean any more?

A more useful approach to this material would be to look at the data Thau obtained, rather than his lockstep "raging centrist" interpretation, for example the way Pennsylvania independents in his focus group looked at Senate candidate John Fetterman, whom they endorsed over Mehmet Öz 9 to 2 with 2 undecided. Not one of them knew what Fetterman's position on abortion was, though as we know they would have agreed with it if they did, but they did have a strong sense of his personality: 

These swing voters may be unaware of Fetterman’s strong support for abortion rights but they loved his outsider persona in describing their feelings toward him: “Weed … different … tax evasion … unpolished … tall … plain-spoken.”

And they were annoyed with Republicans "smearing" him (that was the word they used) over his recent health crisis.

Anyhow, the whole concept of the "center" as a positive thing you can have a passionate commitment to, Andrew Yang's vision of a party that 100% of the people agree with because it never takes a position without universal consensus, or David Brooks's "radical centrism" that will unify the country the way Abraham Lincoln unified the country in his Second Inaugural (i.e. a total fantasy covering up the reality of radical Reconstruction and the conspiratorial agreement on the part of white politicians Whiggish and Toryish to do away with it in 1876) by never taking sides on anything (does Brooks not know that Lincoln delivered that speech after emancipating all the slaves in the rebel states, maybe the most side-taking moment in American history?)—that you could be a "raging" centrist instead of a mouthful of lukewarm cream of wheat—is so stupid it makes me crazy.