RE: CENTRISTS AND POLLS. Mark and Tom have both carried out elegant and effective demolition jobs on the Third Way's recent report. I'll echo something Mark said, though: Midterm elections aren't national elections. Votes accrue to competitive districts. And Charlie Rangel, for instance, isn't in a competitive district, but is in one where a lot of African-American voters live. The token competition Rangel receives isn't much incentive for his constituents to flood the ballot boxes. That's one of the downsides of redistricting minorities into segregated districts: It erases much of the motivation for off-year political participation. The Republicans don't vie for the seats and the Democrats don't have to fight to keep them. And because minority-majority districts are both largely un-competitive and include, by definition, a disproportionate share of minority voters, off-year participation among them will always be lower. Beyond that, though, I'm vaguely fascinated by the obsession centrist groups like the DLC and Third Way have with polling data. In a way that simply isn't true for more liberal or more conservative groups, the centrist organizations are constantly justifying their existence and political efficacy off reams of carefully -- and sometimes, as in this case, poorly -- parsed public opinion data. This goes all the way back to the Galston-Kamarck "Politics of Evasion" paper (which was, to be sure, a seminal effort), continues on with Mark Penn's obsession with moderate, white swing groups, animates the latest Third Way reports, and so on. I don't really have an answer for the phenomenon. My hunch is that both liberals and conservative intuitively understand that their philosophies have a certain instinctual resonance with the broader public, while the DLC-types are similarly aware that nobody-but-nobody wakes up in the morning yearning for a ruling class of reflexively cautious technocrats, and so they spend endless time trying to prove their support among voter's heads because they know they're not in sync with their guts. But that is, as I said, just a hunch. Maybe I should poll it. --Ezra Klein
