The 45% Vacuum: Can You Build a Political Tribe Out of the Moderates Left Behind?

Congress has stopped passing bills, the parties have abandoned the middle, and 45% of voters are stranded. Can a new party actually organize them?

I’ve been looking at the numbers on how much Congress actually gets done, and it’s wild to see how much things have stalled out. Back in the late fifties, the House passed somewhere around 900 bills a session. Now we’re looking at maybe 50 or 60. It’s a completely different machine than it used to be.

Everyone wants to blame this on culture wars or whatever people are arguing about on TV, but the plumbing of the system is what’s actually broken. Because of how districts are drawn now, about 80% of congressional seats are completely safe. They’re decided before anyone even votes in November. When a politician doesn’t have to worry about losing their seat to the other side, they stop talking to the middle entirely. They just play to the fringes because that’s who shows up in the primaries, and that’s where the PAC money is.

It leaves a massive number of people completely stranded. Gallup keeps track of this, and right now something like 45% of Americans say they don’t identify with either major party. Meanwhile, the Democrats and Republicans are stuck at about 20% each.

I recently talked to Paul Chapman, a political scientist who is trying to build a new third party called the CenterCratic party to tap into that 45%. Instead of writing a massive, rigid policy platform, he’s trying to build the whole thing around nine basic rules for how to actually govern—things like term limits, sticking to facts in debates, and focusing on compromise rather than trying to crush the other side.

But when you look at why third parties always seem to hit a wall, it usually comes down to something political scientists call negative partisanship. It’s the idea that people don’t vote because they love their party; they vote because they’re terrified of the other guy. So even if someone tells a pollster they’re independent, when they get into the voting booth, the fear of letting the “worst” option win usually pulls them right back into line.

Chapman’s strategy to get around the usual ballot access hurdles involves focusing on write-in campaigns in the 41 states that allow them, and trying to pull in funding from moderate donors who are just tired of the extremes. He’s not trying to convert the hard partisans on the left or the right, but rather trying to see if that unaligned middle can actually be organized into its own distinct group.

It makes you wonder if people are actually capable of voting for something they want, rather than just voting against what they hate, especially when the entire media and political ecosystem is built to keep everyone terrified of the alternative.

Check out the full episode to hear from Paul about his efforts.

---

New This Week in Outrage Episode!

It’s everything the Outrage Overload podcast is not. It’s not edited. It’s not scripted. It’s lightly researched. It’s David and Lisa talking about this week in outrage, what was in the news, in the memes, and maybe finding some backstory with a humorous (at least to us) twist.