Photo Credit: National Review The conservative project has two main parts: first, winning the argument, and, second, winning elections. The first is a job for what we call the conservative movement, meaning everything from magazines such as National Review to think tanks, advocacy groups, talk radio, and book publishers; the second is mainly the job of the Republican party and organizations such as the Club for Growth, which helps to ensure that victories for Republicans are victories for conservatives. There’s always a great deal of tension between those two goals, as we can see in everything from the current intramural fight over shutdown tactics to the ongoing debate over how much weight we should give to philosophical rigor versus “electability” when it comes to the nomination of candidates. NR’s principle of supporting the most conservative viable candidate is a way to try to balance those priorities, but the best way of proceeding under that guideline is not always self-evident.

That conundrum is worth thinking about right now in light of this astonishing fact: When it comes to the policy opinions of American voters, there have been three peak years for conservatism: 1952, 1980, and . . . right now, according to Professor James A. Stimson, whose decades-long “policy mood” project tracks the changing opinions of the U.S. electorate. Americans have grown more conservative on the whole, but the even more remarkable fact is that the electorate has grown more conservative in every state. As Larry Bartels points out in the Washington Post, the paradoxical fact is that Barack Obama was first elected in a year in which the American policy mood already was unusually conservative, and he was reelected in a year in which it had grown more conservative still. And so the question: Why did an increasingly conservative electorate elect and reelect one of the most left-wing administrations, if not the most left-wing, in American history?

That seeming paradox may be explained in part by the fact that the American public’s increasingly conservative views are not associated with an increased sense of identification with the Republican party. In late January 2004, Gallup found a Republican/Democrat split of 31 percent to 33 percent in the Democrats’ favor, with more identifying as independent (35 percent) than as a member of either party. In September of this year, those numbers were 22/31/45. Add in the “leaners” — those who do not strictly identify with one party but generally are inclined toward its views — and the GOP was at a 44/51 disadvantage in 2004, and today is at a 41/47 disadvantage. Which is to say, the Republicans lost 3 percent who didn’t move to the Democrats, and the Democrats lost 4 percent who didn’t move to the Republicans. Independents jumped from 35 percent to 45 percent during that period.

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