Just over a week before the mid-term elections, House Majority Leader John Boehner told George Stephanopoulos that he did not worry about the Republicans retaining their majority in the House. “Where Republicans are being hurt most is among independents,” he said. “But independents don’t show up in the off year.”
What Boehner said is true, independents typically do not vote in mid-term elections… except when they do. And therein lies the problem for Mr. Boehner, his party, and the Democrats, too. For reasons that only a highly paid pollster could understand, both parties have made a priority of pandering to the wings of their parties for most of the past 25 years. From President Bush’s “values voters” to John Kerry’s assortment of single-issue activists, politicians now instinctively run to their base to try to lock up a win.
But as the results of the mid-term elections show, the winners in 2006 were the least likely to succeed of all- the Middle Men. In terms of both the voters who turned out and the people they chose, the men and women whom journalist Joe Klein calls the “Flaming Moderates” roared back from obscurity this year to change the face of Congress. Independents made up one-forth of the electorate and provided the swing votes that made the difference in most Democratic pick-ups in the House and Senate. They also purged some of the most radical members from the Left and the Right and replaced them with people who, for now, seem to be thinking with their heads and not their focus groups.
Included on the list of early electoral casualties for 2006 were extremists from both parties. In Georgia, Ralph Reed and Cynthia McKinney were dismissed in their primaries, sparing the state and the country potentially years of rants and tirades from them both. In Alabama, Roy Moore, the Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court made famous for posting the 10 Commandments in the Supreme Court building, lost in his bid to the run the Deep South state, which in the end told him he might be too conservative for their tastes.
Of course, when the Democrats counted their votes on Election Night, they must have noticed that some of their victories were not like the others, that many of their incoming freshmen won their races specifically because they were not typical Democrats. From Heath Shuler in North Carolina to Jon Tester in Montana to Bob Casey, Jr. in Pennsylvania, Democratic candidates won this year when they split from their party on the most visible planks of the platform– abortion, gun control and gay marriage. Much like Republicans Mitt Romney, George Pataki and Arnold Schwarzenegger before them, these break-the-mold Democrats won on the strength of their independence, not the strength of their party.
In the northeast, two men won victories by running against both parties. When Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman are sworn in to the 110th Congress in January, it will be the first time since 1977 that two independents serve in the Senate at the same time. The last two were Sen. James Buckley (brother of William F. Buckley, Jr.), a member of the Conservative Party from New York, and independent Sen. Harry F. Byrd of Virginia. Unlike the Senate of the 70s, however, the Democrats in the next Congress will have a paper-thin majority and will have to woo the new independents in the same way they’ve courted their left wing for years.
Of the many unusual features in the Lieberman campaign, the most unorthodox was the combination of people working for him- staffers and supporters from both parties, including several loaners from the (formerly Democratic) Republican mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg. Was Bloomberg lending staff out of the goodness of his heart? Of course not. The New York Times reported that he was conducting a test case for the viability of an independent campaign for president, a proposition made far less nutty by the strength of the independent vote this year, as well as the Lieberman win he helped to engineer.
Like Ross Perot, the last serious independent to run for president, Mayor Bloomberg is very, very rich. He could self-fund an entire candidacy without denting his $5 billion fortune. But unlike Perot, Bloomberg does not come off like a lunatic with a fondness for charts and one-liners. He is, by contrast, a plain, almost dowdy, model of assertive efficiency. Not only did he launch one of the most successful media companies in the country, he has displayed a genius in his current role for making things work. A Bloomberg run for president would be a viable alternative for moderate voters who feel more strongly about the future of the country than about the future of either party, just the voters who tipped the results this year.
In Washington today, each party is absorbing the impact of what’s happened and promising to play nicer the next time around. Nancy Pelosi and President Bush are sitting down to lunch and both sides are offering bi-partisanship as the first resort to solve their problems in the future.
But what happens as the 2008 elections approach and the addiction to playing-to-the-base asserts itself? What happens when the lobbyists and special interests come to members’ offices to remind them of their generous support and make their “asks”? Can we really expect the I-Know-You-Are-But-What-Am-I wings of either party to sit on the sidelines and let the moderates make a deal?
Possibly. Because, when the new Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader meet with their caucuses next week, they will see dozens of new faces among the groups, including a few green recruits who are deliberately not signing on the party line. And when the Republicans squeeze into their smaller meeting rooms, they will certainly wonder why the new socially conservative giant killers chose to run as Democrats in the first place. Everybody involved will know that Mrs. Pelosi and Harry Reid are enjoying the unfamiliar tang of real power while the Republicans box up their gavels because the Democrats won the Flaming Moderates this time around. Whether they hold the middle, and the power that comes with it, is what the next two years are all about.