Candidates Still Take Cues From Their Base
Independents' Rise Presents Dilemma

By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 16, 2007

Five months after midterm elections that demonstrated the rising power of independent voters, conservative and liberal activists continue to drive the presidential campaign dialogue, deepening the red-blue divisions that have defined national politics for more than a decade.

The huge gulf between the two parties' candidates is most evident on Iraq -- a division reinforced last week by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who excoriated his Democratic rivals on the war. The top Republican contenders uniformly support President Bush's troop buildup strategy; Democrats just as forcefully argue for starting to withdraw U.S. troops and a timetable for eventual removal of virtually all combat forces.

But the war is not the only area in which the candidates are at opposing poles of the debate. On issues such as taxes and spending, health care, and education, candidates are mostly taking their cue from -- or trying to cozy up to -- their respective ideological bases. In doing so, they risk embracing positions that could complicate later efforts to win the support of independent voters, whose votes will be crucial in November 2008.

Right now, that problem appears more acute for Republicans. At this point, polling indicates that independents do not fall at some midpoint between the parties; rather, they are far closer in their views to Democrats than Republicans, particularly on the dominant issue, the Iraq war. Their shift away from Bush was critical in the Democrats' victories in November, and independents give no sign of moving back to the GOP.

Compounding the problem for GOP candidates, the Republican base remains solidly behind the president on the war. On domestic issues such as government spending and immigration, the base is farther to the right than the president. That gives GOP candidates little incentive to carve out an identity clearly separate from the administration.

At the same time, many conservatives have doubts about the party's three leading candidates -- McCain, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney -- causing all three to look for ways to highlight conservative themes as they campaign.

The Republicans' plight has bolstered the confidence of the Democratic candidates that they can simultaneously appeal to their energized, liberal base and to more moderate independents. But key party strategists warn that the candidates are flirting with problems in the general election if they are not careful, particularly on the war. The intensifying standoff between congressional Democrats and the White House over funding for the war threatens to make that worse.

William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution, a Clinton administration domestic policy adviser and an early opponent of the Iraq war, said his party should note that voters appear just as worried that Democrats would withdraw from Iraq too quickly as they are concerned that Republicans would stay there too long.

"I think it's important to distinguish between the desire to bring this agony to an end and the consequences of bringing it to an end in the wrong way," he said. "I can't prove this, but I believe Democrats will be held responsible if they are seen as advocating a course of action that doesn't take the consequences of failure into account. We cannot afford as a party to be either silent or blithe about the consequences of rapid withdrawal."

It is common in the early stages of a presidential campaign for Democratic candidates to move left and Republicans to go to the right, only to shift back toward the center for the general election. But after midterm elections widely interpreted as signaling at least in part a desire for less polarization, what is most striking along the campaign trail is the disjunction between the messages of the two sides.

Republican and Democratic candidates crisscross in Iowa and New Hampshire, sometimes staging events within blocks of each other, but they speak to different tribes of a still sharply divided nation.

Republicans and Democrats disagree not only about issues, said Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center, but also about the state of the nation. A recent poll asking about people's personal financial situation found that Republicans and Democrats with similar incomes gave sharply different answers. "In the '90s, Republicans and Democrats would differ on things," he said, "but they didn't differ on where we were."

GOP strategists argue that no matter what polls say about the views of independents, their candidates would be foolish to pay too much attention to a general-election audience at this point.

"One of my life experiences in Republican primaries is it's better to win them," McCain pollster Bill McInturff told an audience at Harvard University last month. "So you tend to say what would be required to win the primary first. I've been in primaries where they have looked ahead to the general election; they tended not to be very successful."

Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg said the White House strategy to prevent Republicans from fracturing on the war and other issues during Bush's final two years in office dramatically complicates the election strategies for GOP presidential candidates.

"Republicans have gotten more anti-Democratic and more supportive of the president, making it very hard for elected Republicans to buck him and very hard for presidential candidates to buck him," he said.

Geoffrey Garin, another Democratic pollster, said anti-Bush sentiment among independents makes it far easier for Democratic candidates to maneuver through the nominating process. "It's important for our candidates to remember that there's an event that comes after the nominating process," he said. "But the Republicans are at so much more peril for the general election process in terms of what they have to do to appeal to their base during the primaries and caucuses."

Garin cited two areas in which independents part company with the Democrats' liberal base. One is health care, on which the base is more open to the kind of single-payer system that more moderate voters resist. The other area is Iraq. "Independent voters tend to be substantially more nuanced in their attitudes abut how we should try to resolve the situation in Iraq," he said.

Many Republican strategists concede that the current shape of the electorate and the opposition to the war favors Democrats heading toward 2008. But Ed Goeas, Giuliani's pollster, offered another view. Both Giuliani and McCain, he said, run competitively when matched against either Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) or Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

The reason? "It's that Republican candidates are doing better with independent voters," he said.

David Winston, a GOP pollster, said he anticipates more creativity on domestic issues as the campaign matures. "Because the discourse has been dominated by Iraq, I don't think you've begun to see these candidates begin to evolve on domestic policy," he said.

McInturff told the Harvard audience that whoever wins the GOP nomination will have to separate himself from the president. White House officials "understand that our next nominee is going to be very different than this administration," he said. "They'll tolerate those views. What they won't tolerate is something that looks like some personal assault on the president."

That may foreshadow potentially significant moves on the part of the Republican candidates in the future, but the 2008 campaign has begun as an extension of the recent past, with the two parties deeply polarized.