A mandate for moderation

Thursday, President Obama and Mitt Romney — victor and vanquished — will meet for the first time since Election Day, and questions will again swirl about whether the Republican Party has a shot at the Oval Office.

But the great lesson of the November election is the most obvious: It was close. It was close for Obama in terms of the national popular vote; the latest numbers show him winning about 50.8% and Mitt Romney netting 47.5%.
The House, though still Republican-controlled, is tighter than before, with Democrats netting more total popular votes and picking up eight congressional seats. And in the Senate, Democrats picked up one seat nationally and one via independent affiliation, as Sen.-elect Angus King plans to caucus with them.
Some Democrats are interpreting the results as a blanket validation of their priorities — as a sign that they have to bend far less than Republicans in negotiations over how to avert the fiscal cliff — in other words, that tax hikes should be a bigger part of the solution than spending cuts.
This is a misinterpretation of where the voters were and are. They are crying out for a middle course, not a liberal one.
At the polling place on Nov. 6, there was one clear mandate: for a new way of doing business in Washington. New Gallup data show that 65% of Americans expect the President to make a sincere effort to work with the Republicans in Congress, and 57% expect Democrats in Congress to work with the Republican leadership. That said, less than 50% (48%) said the same about Republicans in Congress.
Still, overall, these numbers are representative of an electorate that wants both sides to slay their share of sacred cows in service of the greater good.
Some decry this assertion as lily-livered centrism lacking in backbone. To the contrary, it’s a strong and accurate expression of popular will.
We saw a rejection of extremism across races at all levels. Candidates like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock on the right dug their own graves with radical comments on rape and abortion. Romney himself suffered for extreme positions that he took in the primaries and failed to adequately distance himself from ones he took his moderate turn in the debates.
And while there appears to have been a decisive push for a more progressive set of social policies — as expressed through a referendum legalizing marijuana use in Colorado and elsewhere and others expanding gay rights in liberal states — there is hardly a mandate for broad left-leaning political or social change nationwide.
For one, the states where we have seen evidence of a strong move to the left were already among the most liberal in the country. Just as likely, the shift on gay rights and marijuana could be an expression of latent libertarian feeling — or progressivism unrelated to questions about the size and shape of government.
There’s no indication more broadly that voters want the feds to spend more or get more involved in their lives. In fact, 53% of those surveyed, a number greater than the total vote count Obama received, said that they want more limited government as opposed to big government.
To be sure, recent polling is now showing that there is heightened awareness of the impending fiscal cliff and bipartisan agreement on the seriousness of our situation. According to a new Pew poll, the fiscal cliff debate was the most closely followed news story two weeks ago, beating out the David Petraeus scandal and the investigation into the Benghazi attack. Nearly equal numbers of Republicans (36%) and Democrats (35%) reported that the fiscal cliff was the most pressing issue for them.
Our own post-election polling, of a representative sample of 600 Americans, corroborates these results: No matter which party Americans identify with, people want cooperation to solve our fiscal problems. And they want it fast.
In our survey, 88% of Americans want a bipartisan agreement to reduce the deficit, where everything is on the table and both parties compromise on positions they feel strongly about, including spending cuts and tax increases.
The public supports raising taxes on those at the top and wants to preserve the social safety net. But it also wants clear constraints on government’s size and power to promote free-market capitalism.
All in all, the election was a validation of the message of moderation and prudence. Neither party is in a position to move far from the center, as Obama did in 2010 with Obamacare and the Republicans did with their candidates and their message. Anyone straying too far will be punished at the polls in the future.
Schoen is an author and political consultant. Tarlov is political strategist for Douglas Schoen, LLC.