Centrist Gains Give Pause to Both Extremes

WASHINGTON —  Two big-state choices for governor--the victories of Democrat Gray Davis in California and Republican George W. Bush in Texas--sent a resounding message to strategists in both political parties this week: The nation’s voters are looking for moderation, not ideology.

“California scares the hell out of me,” said GOP pollster Frank Luntz, one of the architects of the 1994 conservative upsurge that gave Republicans control of Congress. “Social conservatism is not a dominant force anymore. . . . Republican candidates need a new voice and a new language.”

In California, Texas and other states, the election “was a victory for moderate, centrist candidates . . . [even] where Republicans did well,” said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

Across the nation, many Democrats who won cast themselves, like Davis, as fiscally conservative, tough-on-crime moderates--not old-fashioned liberals. “Gray Davis is a genuine ‘New Democrat,’ ” Lieberman said.

And several Republican candidates for governor and senator, like Bush, won big majorities espousing what the Texas governor calls “compassionate conservatism”: fiscally prudent, tough on crime, but focused on improving public education--not “hot-button” social issues like abortion and gay rights.

Shift Appears to Favor Democrats

In the short run, at least, that news appeared to favor Democrats, who did better than expected in Tuesday’s elections.

The Democratic Party made a concerted effort this year to broaden the ranks of its candidates to include more centrists, especially in the South, where Democrats won hotly contested Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina and Arkansas.

But for the GOP, the ascent of relative moderates like Bush poses a potential problem because it could open a fault line between the party’s pragmatic governors and its more conservative congressional leaders.

“For Republicans, the lesson from the successful governors--George W. Bush, Jeb Bush [of Florida], John Rowland [of Connecticut], Tom Ridge [of Pennsylvania]--is that if you are conservative, pragmatic and inclusive, you can build a majority coalition that other Republicans can only dream of,” said Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

But many conservatives in Congress seem to be headed in the other direction, he said. “Conservatives in the House are drawing a different lesson: that they need to move back to [social] issues like abortion and prayer in schools.”

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and other GOP congressional leaders disagree, insisting that they can fashion a coalition uniting their most fervent social conservatives with their most pragmatic governors.

Yet even before this week’s election, Republican leaders in the House sometimes collided with Republicans in the statehouses over issues like welfare reform, in which governors didn’t want Congress imposing ideological limits on their freedom to experiment.

“The conventional wisdom is true: The Republicans [in Congress] overreached. They handed the Democrats a better chance to win back these seats,” said Joel Silbey, a political historian at Cornell University. “And that could lead to a major conflict among Republicans in the next few months.”

“Republican candidates need to learn to speak in ways that appeal beyond the Republican base,” worried GOP strategist Luntz. “That’s the key to winning a majority.”

The idea of competing for votes in the center of the electorate isn’t new, of course. That’s what both parties have attempted to do, with varying success, for most of the nation’s history.

Democrats Follow Clinton’s Lead

What’s new is Democrats’ recently adopted enthusiasm for the kind of budget-cutting centrism that President Clinton pioneered in his reelection drive in 1996, plus a drive to encourage outright conservative Democrats to run in the South.

The Democrats’ Southern strategy produced an unexpected Senate victory in North Carolina, where attorney John Edwards toppled Republican Sen. Lauch Faircloth, and a House seat in Mississippi, where state Highway Commissioner Ronnie Shows defeated a better-funded Republican.

“What we’re seeing now is a mirror image of the 1980s, when the Democrats ran off the left side of the road and allowed the Republicans to take the middle,” crowed Al From, president of the Democratic Leadership Council. “This time, the Republicans have run off the right side of the road, giving us a good chance to take the middle.”

From said all of the 41 current House members allied with the centrist DLC were reelected Tuesday, and an additional nine New Democrats were elected, for a total of 50, almost one-fourth of the 211 Democrats in next year’s House.

“This election demonstrated that the Republican tide that supposedly began in 1994 has crested,” he said. “The emergence of the religious right as the dominant force in the Republican Party has put a ceiling on their ability to grow.”

Blunders of GOP Leaders Blamed

In a presidential election year, with larger turnout, “we would have taken control of the House,” he argued.

Congressional scholar Ornstein disagreed, saying it is too early to draw such a sweeping conclusion.

“This election was not clearly the outcome of that kind of long-term trend,” he said. “There was nothing foreordained about these results. It could have been very different if it hadn’t been for the blunders of Republican leaders.” He said the GOP’s congressional leaders had allowed the Democrats to paint them as more interested in investigating Clinton’s private life than in improving public education.

Turnout in Tuesday’s election was only 36.1% of the eligible population, the lowest since 1942, according to figures released Thursday by the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.

Outside of the South, turnout fell to its lowest level since 1818, the panel said.

The decline in turnout resumed a long-term trend that was briefly interrupted in 1994, when turnout hit 38.8%.

Some states showed increased turnout, where hotly contested elections offered “something important to decide,” said Curtis Gans, who directed the study. “Those elections are the exception.”

But Tuesday’s results confounded one ancient political rule of thumb: the notion that low turnout benefits the GOP. In California and New York, turnout was down, but Democrats won the most contested races, Gans noted. “The outcome is determined not by turnout but by who turns out,” he said.