Winstonm, on 2018-October-14, 10:21, said:
I'm not so certain there is such a thing as a middle voter in the age of Dennison. Here in Oklahoma the governor's race on the Republican side is an appeal to Dennison support/Hillary hate. I doubt any middle voters can be swayed by that message.
From what I see nationally, there is little doubt the Senate will remain solidly Republican because the nature of the voting base gives rural areas more sway and the election cycle this time favors Republicans in Senate races anyway. In reality, all we are discussing is the House, and in the House it is more district-centric, meaning that there isn't nor should there be a single national message about Kavanaugh, IMHO.
In mathematics we sometimes have theoretical proofs of existence, for example every polynomial of any degree has a root even if it has not been found. These are contrasted with explicit proofs of existence, for example the quadratic formula for polynomials of degree two. I offer myself as an explicit proof of the existence of a middle voter.
Of course it can be a matter of definition, so: In Maryland the ratio of registered Ds to registered Rs is something like 2 to 1. We have a Republican governor, Larry Hogan. I voted for him four years ago. It went like this: The D candidate was the Lt. Gov and like most Lt Govs in most places he did not have many responsibilities. So, as the ACA was coming into being, he was assigned the job of doing what had to be done to get us in on it. He made a hash of it and we imported the solution from Rhode Island or somewhere. Of course the D leadership then explained that he really had very little responsibility for the mess, really it was all someone else's fault, but there was quite a bit of fanfare when he was put in charge of it and had it gone well he surely would have boasted of this success. I figured that the one thing he had been given to do, surely to give him something he could boast of, he screwed up. So I voted for Hogan. He is running for re-election and the last I heard he has a 20 point lead.
At the other end of my life, I was a 13 year old supporter of Adlai Stevenson in 1952 but four years later I thought Ike had done a pretty good job and, had I been a voter, I might well have voted for him. Maybe yes, maybe no, but again I was in the center.
So we exist. The D leadership seems to have trouble noting our existence. A pity.
Added: Of course I am not claiming that I am a down-the-line centrist, far from it. I am a registered D, I mostly vote D, I agree with a large part of D positions. I am only saying that I, and many others whether registered D or R, will vote as we think best in any given election, and that the leadership might want to consider that fact as important. We really do exist.