A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on May 8th, 2009 in Campaign News

I spent a bit of time today in email exchanges with a group of people who are just entirely pissed at Arlen Specter. The thing is: They’re Democrats. In fact, the whole thing started off with one person declaring that she wanted a “real Democrat” to run in the primary against Specter and that she wanted to help him “dip into his retirement account.”

So what, I wondered, happened to the idea of a “big tent” Democratic Party? And, while we are pondering things, let us consider what is meant by “real Democrat.”

Here’s the starting point. The Democratic Party does not require any sort of loyalty oath or statement of beliefs in order for a person to join. If you look to the national party for direction, you get stuff like this:

The Democratic Party is committed to keeping our nation safe and expanding opportunity for every American. That commitment is reflected in an agenda that emphasizes the strong economic growth, affordable health care for all Americans, retirement security, open, honest and accountable government, and securing our nation while protecting our civil rights and liberties.

I can’t find anything wrong with that. But I can’t find anything that anyone would find wrong with it. Honestly – is someone going to stand up and say that we don’t need to be safe or that we don’t need opportunity for every American? To address the point at hand, would Arlen Specter disagree with that? I mean, if he signs on to that vacuous statement, then he’s technically a “real Democrat.”

And here’s the thing – the people of Pennsylvania apparently like Arlen Specter. You can tell because they keep sending him back to DC. And they like him even better as a Democrat. Seventy-one percent of Democrats in Pennsylvania approve of Arlen Specter.

Seems like they are satisfied that Specter is a “real Democrat.” Or, more to the point, they simply don’t care what party he belongs to. They want to send him back to DC anyway.

Even Daily Kos’ polling only proves this point. In a Democratic primary, Specter beats “real Democrats” Sestak and Torsella, 54-29-11. That isn’t peanuts. 37 percent of Democrats are positive they will vote for Specter. That’s a pretty high floor to go into the primary with. In head-to-head matchups, Specter’s closest competitor is “undecided.” And close to half of those Democrats say that their support is not contingent on Specter voting for either the Employee Free Choice Act or health care reform.

Meanwhile, in the general election head-to-head match-ups, Specter walks away with more than half of the vote. The “real Democrats” manage to outpoll the Republican front-runner – who is generally unknown – by only two and five points. The DK diarist declares this a Democratic victory. I have no idea why.

Consider this continuum as an indication of political positioning:

<--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->
L10 L5 0 C5 C10

In the absence of better data, we generally understand the distribution of political ideology to approximate a normal distribution. That means that the vast majority of voters are going to cluster around zero, or within one standard deviation of it. For our purposes, we’ll say that probably ninety percent of voters lie somewhere between L5 and C5. Now, let’s plot Specter at C2. For him to win re-election, he has to be closer to the voters than his opponent, and if his opponent were an L2, it would perfectly balance. Since Specter is winning by double-digits, we’ll say that his opponents have been around L3. Both candidates pick up all of the votes to their extreme side, and they split somewhat equally the votes between them (the five points between L3 and C2). Because Specter starts out closer to the center, where most voters are, he has a natural advantage and he wins, drawing voters from roughly L1 all the way to the conservative extreme – eleven points worth of voters.

From his level of support among Republicans, we could guess that the GOP distribution in Pennsylvania centers around C6 or so – meaning that Specter is naturally four points away from that peak. This is why more conservative Republicans threaten him in the primary. But, given that he has seventy-one percent support among Democrats, we could speculate that the Democratic peak is somewhere around L1. So Specter is three points away from that peak. When unaffilated voters are added back in, they pull the center back to zero, but they aren’t voting in the primary.

Specter is at a bit of a disadvantage in the primary, because he sits three points from the Democratic peak. To appear as a viable alternative to Specter, Sestak must move far enough to the left to appear different. At L4, Sestak would perfectly balance Specter. To win, he has to move back toward the center just a bit – L3. His stance would also have to be that C2 is just too conservative for Pennsylvania.

Now, let’s say that Sestak wins the primary. He goes into the general at L3 against an opponent that is C6. Again, each candidate picks up all of the votes to their extreme side. Normally, they would split the area between them – the nine points between L3 and C6. That means Sestak could count on picking up all of the votes to the left of C2. Sestak’s problem is that he has already been telling voters for months that C2 is far too conservative for Pennsylvania. That means he has drawn his circle of support back to at least C1 and maybe to dead zero. This means that running as a moderate liberal, Sestak has ceded enough voters to make the race a toss-up.

Pennsylvania naturally favors Democrats, so in a push, Democrats will likely win. The problem is that it will take millions of dollars to make sure it happens. And this is in a race that is sewn-up tight if they just leave Specter alone.

And there are better places to spend the money. Republican Senators are retiring in Missouri, Kansas, New Hampshire, Florida, and Ohio. Additionally, Republican Senators Jim Bunning of Kentucky and David Vitter of Louisiana are guaranteed tough races. Additionally, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma looks like he isn’t going to run. Eight Senatorial campaigns is a lot – Democrats picked up eight Senate seats in ’08 with the Obama juggernaut leading the ticket (actually, nine, but Minnesota is still running their election through the courts). In other words, there ar ealready plenty of targets to sink money into without looking for a safe seat to turn into a toss-up.

It would be incredibly dumb for Democrats to pick on Specter, just on philosophical grounds. Right now, the Democratic Party is looking pretty inviting to Republicans who just don’t feel at home in the increasingly Conservative Party. Start picking on ex-Republicans as examples of reflexive power, and that ends. Then disaffected Republicans decide to stay in the GOP and fight it out.

But, as has been pointed out before, Democrats love to sabotage themselves. So it will probably happen.

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