Choices? Moderate voters stuck in the middle with few

“What is a moderate voter to do?”

A man at a bagel shop in the San Fernando Valley posed that question as he griped about the upcoming election. He was talking about the governor’s race, but he could have been thinking of any number of races that touch Southern California.

He sees Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom as very liberal. He sees Republican candidate John Cox as very conservative. Coincidentally, that’s how both candidates have pitched themselves as they campaigned to first and second places finishes in the June 5 primary, and as they’ve march toward the Nov. 6 general election.

“Neither one of them interests me,” said Peter Dunn, 78, a Woodland Hills resident.

“The option that a moderate would like to see doesn’t exist.”

Dunn, a retired producer of live entertainment and sports events, describes himself as a “Rockefeller Republican,” harkening back to Nelson Rockefeller, the former New York governor and U.S. Vice President who led the moderate wing of the GOP in the 1960s and early 1970s. Dunn believes he’s to the left of many Republican politicians on social issues, and to the right of many Democratic politicians on economic issues. He’s not far enough left or right to fit his definition of a libertarian.

Dunn also thinks his down-the-middle politics remain common among American voters.

Still, he feels like he might as well be invisible.

What’s a moderate?

Candidates running for virtually any big political contest in California aim their appeals to their parties’ activist wings instead of the broad electorate. And political TV and social media offer chatter mostly from partisans who should the loudest.

The Dunns of the world are ignored.

“I feel for your moderate voter,” said Jim Jonas, executive director of the Denver-based National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers.

“[Dunn’s] not making it up. There really are fewer choices for voters in the middle.”

And the core question, “What’s a moderate to do?,” raises other, related questions.

How many moderate voters are there? If American politicians have lost touch with people in the center of the political spectrum, is this a cause or an effect? And, either way, what — if anything — should be done about it?

Are Cox and Newsom really more conservative and liberal than past candidates for governor, and are they typical of candidates for office in general in 2018?

And, above all, what do the words “political moderate” even mean any more?

That definition is a big part of the challenge.

“Moderate,” in 2018, is not necessarily the same as “independent,” which in turn is not necessarily the same as “no party preference,” the one political party choice that is gaining ground and recently beat out “Republican” as No. 2 among registered voters in California.

Self-assessment isn’t to be trusted. People who say they’re “moderate” might not really be centrists. After all, nobody describes themselves as “extremist” — everyone believes they approach politics rationally and reasonably.

Some say you’re a moderate if you don’t always vote for one major party or the other, or if you see value in some of the positions of the party other than the one in which you’re registered, or if you believe that compromise between politicians of different parties or ideologies is necessary. But there’s no set definition.

Political experts disagree on whether moderate even exists right now.

“People who register [with ‘no party preference’], if you dig down on what they believe on different issues, you find they’re liberal or conservative,” said Larry Levine, a veteran campaign consultant in the Los Angeles area. “In California, they’re probably mostly liberal.”

But Chad Peace, president of the non-partisan digital media platform IVC Media and legal strategist for the San Diego-based Independent Voter Project, said people underestimate how many moderates remain in the electorate. He notes that “moderation doesn’t get a lot of Tweets [and] press coverage.”

More in Common, an international non-profit group that says it aims to “build communities and societies that are stronger, more united and more resilient to the increasing threats of polarization and social division,” studied where Americans currently fall along the ideological spectrum.

The group’s report, scheduled to be released in full in October, says that 15 percent of Americans are “moderates who are open to rational persuasion on issues and tend to hold views very close to the average of all Americans.”

The report says 40 percent of moderates indicate they plan to vote for Democrats, only 29 percent for Republicans, in the Nov. 6 congressional elections.

Money and passion

Peace said he thinks there would be more moderate politicians but they’re “forced to the edges because that’s the way to get elected.”

Experts attribute this to several factors: Changes in the media, including the rise of right- and left-leaning outlets like Fox News and MSNBC, have pushed audiences into partisan tribes. The rising cost of running a campaign — especially to run a statewide race in California — forces candidates to appeal to their parties and to sometimes partisan donors on the political wings. Party dominance in many districts, sometimes caused by the drawing of district lines by state officials aiming to lock in incumbents’ advantage, means the winner is likely to be the candidate who woos their party’s base.

“I don’t blame Cox or Newsom for the [partisan] personas they project,” Peace said. “It’s the system they’re part of.”

California took two steps earlier this decade to try to correct the problem: switching redistricting power from state legislators to a bipartisan citizens’ panel, and instituting non-partisan primaries in which the top two vote-getters for a given office, regardless of party, qualify for the general election. Other strategies aimed at the same goal — to revive political moderation — have been proposed or are being tried elsewhere.

Political scientists have reported seeing slightly more moderate office-holders in the California Legislature, but changes to the state’s political process have been no panacea.

In statewide races, the June primary produced two notable results attributable to the top-two format: The U.S. Senate race, in which two Democrats, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and state Senate President Kevin de León, advanced; and the state insurance commissioner race, where a Republican-turned-independent, Steve Poizner, won a place on the November ballot along with Democratic state Sen. Ricardo Lara. Feinstein and Poizner are arguably are more centrist than their opponents, giving moderate voters an option.

The top-two system, Peace said, at least creates incentive for candidates to run to the center and try to win votes from the other party.

If the gubernatorial candidates are doing any of that, it doesn’t seem to be working.

A July poll by the Public Policy Institute of California showed Democrats supporting Newsom by a margin of 76 percent to 10 percent and Republicans supporting Cox by 81 percent to 3 percent. The partisan gaps were much narrower in PPIC polls during the summers before the 2010 and 2014 elections for governor, both won by Jerry Brown, and in several previous gubernatorial races.

Farther back in California history, even Republican hero Ronald Reagan sought and needed crossover votes from Democrats to win California gubernatorial races over Democratic icons Pat Brown in 1966 and Jesse Unruh in 1970. The woo-some-Democrats pattern continued in Reagan’s two presidential election victories.

Cal State Northridge political scientist Tom Hogen-Esch said many moderate voters might be happy with the Jerry Brown years.

“The Democratic Party has balanced the budget in California for several years now and has this rainy-day fund for when things go south,” Hogen-Esch said.

The contrast with Brown might be one reason for some moderates’ — to say nothing of most Republicans’ — distaste for Newsom.

Now what?

So the question remains: What is a moderate to do?

Above all, don’t just sit out the election, said Jonas, the nonpartisan reform leader. Moderates choosing to sit out an election only accelerates what he describes as a “death spiral,” with hyperpartisans encouraging candidates to keep ignoring centrists and appealing to an increasingly strident new base.

Peace, the independent voter advocate, said voters should try to figure out which candidate, in the long-run, will have the “most moderating effect,” and choose them on election day.

Levine, the political consultant, said a voter feeling caught in the middle can only “look at the issues [the candidates] represent and pick the one you like best; that’s the choice you have.”

For voter Dunn, that is easier said than done.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I really have no idea.”