Is the Electorate Moving Right?

[Geee]

Weekly Standard:

The 2010 midterm election saw a historically large percentage of voters claim to be conservative – 42 percent, compared to 32 percent in 2006 and 37 percent in 1994. Unsurprisingly, this has not escaped the notice of liberal analysts who promulgate the “Emerging Democratic Majority” thesis, which proposes that over time the electorate will naturally favor the Democrats. How do these analysts respond to this problematic (for them) trend?

Via a short essay for the Democratic Strategist, entitled “Is the Electorate Moving to the Right? Ruy Teixeira Says No,” we have their straightforward answer. The electorate has not moved in any significant fashion, and what we saw this November is nothing for liberals to worry about.

However, their reasoning on this line of inquiry is highly problematic. For starters, there is a subtle but significant change of subject from the title to the guts of the piece. Ed Kilgore (who introduces Teixeira’s argument) writes at the beginning:

It’s becoming more and more obvious that the big dispute at the heart of most arguments about the larger meaning of the 2010 midterms elections is whether the U.S. electorate is moving ideologically to the Right (sic) in a way that gives Republicans a natural majority in the future. And the very core of that dispute involves the behavior of self-identified independents, who obviously shifted towards the GOP between 2006-08 and 2010, and who seem to be exhibiting more conservative attitudes generally. [Emphasis Mine]