|
|
"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
|
Move Right and Lose: Evidence from the 2000-2008 U.S. Senate Elections
|
|---|
| Parent(s) |
Party
|
| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP May 25, 2010 04:47pm |
| Logged |
0
|
| Category | Analysis |
| Author | Alan Abramowitz |
| News Date | Tuesday, May 25, 2010 10:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | As Ed Kilgore recently discussed at FiveThirtyEight.com, it has become almost an article of faith in Republican circles that the best way for the GOP to regain the ground it has lost in the last two elections is to nominate candidates who take consistently conservative positions on the issues facing the country. According to the "move right and win" theory, by standing forthrightly for traditional family values, smaller government, and less regulation of business, Republican candidates can energize their party's base and win back conservative voters who became disillusioned with the free-spending ways of the Bush Administration and congressional Republicans.
But while the move right and win theory is extremely popular among Republican activists, it directly challenges the widely accepted view of American voting behavior among election scholars. According to the median voter theory first proposed by Anthony Downs in his seminal work, An Economic Theory of Democracy, general election candidates in the U.S. who take strongly conservative or strongly liberal positions tend to alienate moderate voters and therefore perform more poorly at the polls than candidates who hew more closely to the center of the ideological spectrum.
Fortunately, there is some readily available evidence that allows us to test these two competing theories. We can compare the performance of moderate and conservative Republican incumbents in recent U.S. Senate elections. If the move right and win theory is correct, we should find that conservative incumbents did better than expected based on the normal vote for their party while moderate incumbents did worse than expected; if the median voter theory is correct, however, we should find that moderate incumbents did better than expected based on the normal vote for their party while conservative incumbents did worse than expected. |
| Share |
|
|
2¢
|
|
| Article | Read Full Article |
|
| Date |
Category |
Headline |
Article |
Contributor |
|
|
