Centrist voters are political orphans

IT MAY be difficult to imagine in our age of political polarisation. But there was a time in America when it was not uncommon for a voter to “split the ticket” during elections – for instance, vote for a Republican candidate in a Senate election and for a Democrat in a presidential race, or vice versa.

Indeed, when the ideological divisions were not as deep as they are today, elections offered the opportunity for voters to make a pragmatic choice between candidates and to decide whether they were competent enough to deliver on their commitments. Rarely were they tagged as being on the “left” or the “right”. Indeed, both the Democratic and Republican parties were dominated by centrist political leaders who were seeking to win elections, not to gain the upper hand in an ideological struggle between “good” and “bad” guys.

These days, you have people advertising that that they won’t date someone who supports the other party. The competition between the Republican and Democratic parties has been transformed into a zero-sum game between two ideological entities, each trying to impose its world view, if not its way of life, on the other side.