The Biggest Problem With Congress? There Is No Middle Anymore b4in.org/jZb A political analysis by the Republican-aligned consulting firm Public Opinion Strategies dives into the congressional meltdown over Obamacare and the budget, and lays bare the structural dysfunction at hand. In 1982, 344 members of the House fell into a loosely defined political middle, based on cross-over voting histories. In 2012, only 11 members fell into that middle, a tidal shift in the course of a generation. As Chris Cillizza points out at The Washington Post, this means in the short term that chances for a meaningful, forward-looking compromise on anything will be awfully hard to achieve. In 1982, there were 344 Members whose voting records fell somewhere between the most conservative voting Democrat and the most liberal voting Republican in the House. Thirty years later, there were 11. That means that in 1982 the centrists — or at least those who by voting record were somewhere near the middle of their respective parties — comprised 79 percent of the House. In 2012 they made up 2.5 percent of the House. So, yeah. There are any number of reasons for this disappearance — partisan gerrymandering and closed primaries being the two most obvious — but the numbers are unbelievably stark, particularly when you consider that roughly 30 percent of the electorate consider themselves political independents. (According to exit polling, 29 percent of people named themselves independents in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.) … The political incentive to make deals simply does not exist in the House and, in fact, there is almost always a disincentive for members to work across the aisle. more b4in.org/jZb
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 16:28:31 +0000
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