Apparently It's Not About the Middle

From pollster Tom Jensen's analysis for the latest Daily Kos survey of the Missouri Senate race, which puts Republican Roy Blunt up 45 percent to 38 percent over Democrat Robin Carnahan:

Robin Carnahan is winning 78% of Barack Obama’s voters and Roy Blunt is winning 76% of John McCain’s voters so if the electorate this year was the same as in 2008 when Missouri was basically a tie, this race would be tied as well. But we find a likely electorate this fall that voted for John McCain by 7 points. This dropoff in Democratic interest is pretty reflective of what we’ve seen across the country so far this election cycle. In the Massachusetts Senate race we found those who showed up had voted for Obama by 20, in contrast to his 26 point victory in the state. Our final Virginia poll last fall found a McCain +1 electorate when Obama won the state by 6 and our last New Jersey survey saw those voting at Obama +11 when he really took the state by 15.

Democrats are not doing badly this year because people who voted for Obama in 2008 are switching over to the Republicans. There’s actually little of that happening in any race across the country. Almost the entire problem for the party is their voters being disengaged. And while there’s no doubt that’s going to hurt big time this November, it means the relevance of this fall’s results to the 2012 election is limited if the Obama machine can replicate its 2008 turnout operation when he’s back on the ballot. The GOP really isn’t growing support- it’s just benefiting from Democratic complacency.

When it comes down to it, Democrats aren't losing voters to the Republicans so much as they are losing voters to, as Jensen puts it, complacency. While this is in a way obvious -- more than enough words have been written about the coalition of new and irregular voters put together by Barack Obama in 2008, the natural implication of which is that many if not most of these voters may not return to the polls in this year's midterms -- it does upend the traditional common wisdom that the way for Democrats to succeed is to move to the middle rather than energize the base. Of course this does not mean that the Democrats will find salvation only by getting their voters to the polls, because clearly voters in the middle matter. But if the electorate this fall is 5 to 10 percentage points more Republican than it was in 2008, as was the case during last fall's gubernatorial elections and in the polling discussed above, it won't matter much whether or not the Democrats are able to win 1 or 2 or even 5 percent more swing voters, because without Democrats going to the polls the cause is lost.