Frank Luntz had an interesting piece in Sunday’s L.A. Times on what the British call “floating voters”:
Right now, fully 80% of Americans give at least one of the candidates a passing or failing grade, according to polling that I’ve done — and they are breaking relatively evenly for McCain and Obama. That leaves 20% floating around like rowboats looking for a dock slip. According to the website RealClearPolitics, the average of national polls has Obama beating McCain 47% to 43%, with just 10% seemingly undecided or uncommitted. But the real floating vote is twice that number because it includes people with a slight preference, not just those with no preference at all. And it is that 20%, not the outspoken partisans on either side, that will decide this historic election.
That may seem surprising, as conditioned as we are to talk of an increasingly polarized electorate. However, going back at least as far as the late 1980s, pols like RNC Chair Frank Fahrenkopf and DNC Chair Paul Kirk used to talk about “the 11% solution.” The idea was largely that which Luntz posits — that presidential contests are generally fought over winning over a majority of this floating 20% of the electorate (which is technically less than 11%, but 11% sounds cooler).
I was unsure whether that dynamic was still in play. If Luntz is correct, it tends to support my hypothesis that the recent shift in party identification favoring the Democrats is bad for the GOP, but not as bad as the topline party ID numbers would suggest. In either event, Luntz has additional observations about floater voters in this cycle are telling, so RTWT.
He’s not a lot given to repeating himself so I’ll just put this here for counterpoint.
Yeah, I’ve responded to him there also. Funny how the people who crunch numbers on exactly these issues seem to disagree with him.
It isn’t a new phenomenon Karl. In fact, I’m sure you mentioned those ‘low information – low interest’ voters before. And also, each race – senate, house, and presidency – is a seperate race. Many voters split their ticket and will vote to keep their Democratic representative, but will vote in the Republican president because they trust him.
Few voters are as ideological as formal party members, or as ideological as those who post and comment on the internet. Most voters have weak issue preferences for most things, maybe one or two issues they have strong preferences on. Beyond that they will go with a gut reaction.
I just kind of a lot like the tone of it is all. It’s very knowing and aptly cynical plus the proxy violence part rings true I think.
“Few voters are as ideological as formal party members”
Last election I was surprised at the local poll (well, not really). When I was in the polling line, there were 4 people I could see that had the local union paper with endorsed candidates/issues and they just held the paper to the electronic screen and were the quickest done. There are no curtains or walls so anyone could see what was going on. It is just shows how intelligent and ideological they really are.
Eeeeewwww. Floater voters. I wonder if they’re blinkin’ floaters.
Hmmmm.
What I find humorous is the pursuit of the last 20% always seems to require pissing off the other 80%.
memomachine: That is our inheiratance from the structure that the Constitution gave us. Because all elective offices run their own races (I know the senate was originally appointed by state legislatures, but it still fits). We do not have strong parties, we do not have top-down parties, we do not have lock-step conformist parties. A strict party-line conform-to-ideology presidential candidate can get about one-thrid of the votes. That is not enough here in the United States. Compromise is forced because without compromise you can’t get office, and without office you can’t get much of anything you want on the agenda.