Is the Republican Base Bigger?

Pandagon in a piece a few days ago raises a very important question: is the Democratic base smaller than the Republican base? Here's is Pandagon's basic position: the mobilization strategy for Democratic victory is to organize and turn out the left, while the median voter strategy is to win over undecideds. In the last election, the Democrats did both fairly effectively and still lost. Kerry won among moderates and enjoyed substantial and enthusiastic support among self-described liberals. So the mobilization strategy and the median voter strategy to be effective both require an expanded liberal base.

I think that Pandagon's statements about "growing" liberalism and creating a strategy of persuasion is very well taken, and consistent with what I and others have been saying. What I question is whether ideological self-identification is really the best measure of the respective sizes of the 2 party's bases. After all, two-thirds of voters who describe themselves as independents are reliable partisans. That is why political scientists rely more on behavior than attitude: the latter is reliably unreliable.

To get a better idea of the basic strength of liberalism (or at least its potential strength), we need to ask people not "are you a liberal" but "what is your position on the following issues...." If you do that, then you learn that liberalism as an issue profile remains in a substantial majority on most issues, particularly in domestic policy. So a lot of self-described "moderates" are really liberals. Or so I would contend.

The fact that they don't call themselves liberals returns to the point Pandagon was making: the term "liberal" has been negatively branded, and needs to be rehabilitated. What we should keep in mind is that, because of the inherent popularity of liberal positions, the task of expanding liberalism won't be quite so difficult as we have been thinking. A Democratic majority may be far closer than it appears.