A GOP Presidential Candidate Must Seize the Center to Win

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It’s simple math, backed up by the historical record: no conservative can win the White House without moderate votes. Michael Medved on why critics of his views about the need to appeal to the center are wrong.

What sort of fool or fantasist would ever suggest that “Republicans need a centrist candidate in 2012”?

I certainly reject the notion of a “centrist candidate,” though some angry conservatives have misinterpreted my arguments (and misquoted my words) to accuse me of this fatuous heresy.

In a much-debated op-ed in The Wall Street Journal (“Conservatives, Romney and Electability”), I insisted that “the electoral experience of the last 50 years does nothing to undermine the common-sense notion that most political battles are won by seizing and holding the ideological center. In the last two presidential elections, more than 44 percent of voters described themselves as ‘moderate,’ and no conservative candidate could possibly prevail without coming close to winning half of them (as George W. Bush did in his reelection).”

Please note: I argue that a conservative candidate must earn moderate votes in order to win, not that a centrist nominee is the only formula for victory.

The math here isn’t complicated. Even if the Republican nominee drew every available conservative voter (an obvious impossibility, since exit polls show that even the heroic Reagan got less than three fourths of them in 1980), then he would still need more than a third of self-described moderates to win a popular-vote majority.

Suggesting that conservative candidates need to appeal to the center as well as to the right if they want to win isn’t a matter of opinion; it’s a simple statement of fact. There has never been an election in the history of exit polling where a majority of voters described themselves as conservative. In the Bush victory of 2004 and the McCain defeat of 2008, identical percentages (34 percent) called themselves conservative.

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