There’s a fear that the Democratic primary electorate is so far to the left of the typical voter that the Democratic nominee, in responding to the primary electorate, will move too far left to be electable. That’s certainly a possibility but a new poll from Greeberg Quinlan Rosner (GQR) of likely voters in the New Hampshire and South Carolina Democratic primaries, as well as likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa, makes clear that the left militance of the Democratic primary electorate can easily be overstated.

Take the issue of Iraq. Sure, it’s true that 68 percent, 59 percent and 74 percent, respectively, of these Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina voters say it’s very or somewhat important for the Democratic nominee to have opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. But when asked whether they would prefer “a Democratic nominee who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning” or “a Democratic nominee who supported military action against Saddam Hussein but was critical of Bush for failing to win international support for the war”, the figures are 37 percent for the first choice and 59 percent for the second choice in Iowa; 35 percent/58 percent in New Hampshire and 41 percent/50 percent in South Carolina. In other words, in each one of these states more likely Democratic primary voters want a candidate with a nuanced opposition to Bush’s Iraq policy than want one who adamantly opposed to the war all along.

That indicates that Clark’s inconsistency on the war (suggesting that there might have been some legitimate reasons to have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing the use of force) is not as much of a liability with Democratic primary voters as generally assumed. Still less should Dean’s intransigent opposition to the war be assumed to be an unalloyed boon with these same voters.

Or take the issue of tax cuts. Gephardt and Dean have both staked out positions calling for the repeal of all the Bush tax cuts. Presumably most Democratic primary voters agree that these tax cuts were basically a bad idea. But that doesn’t mean that they necessarily agree that Gephardt and Dean have the best approach to the tax cut issue. Indeed, when these Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina voters are asked whether “we should repeal the entire Bush tax cut” (the Dean/Gephardt position) or “we should repeal the Bush tax cut for the richest one percent and keep the middle class tax cuts” (roughly speaking, the Clark/Kerry/Lieberman/Edwards position), they split down the middle, with slightly more for the second choice in Iowa and New Hampshire and slightly more for the first choice in South Carolina.

That suggests a targeted, rather than total, repeal of the Bush tax cuts has a good chance of finding favor with Democratic primary voters. And that’s a good thing. It is very difficult to construct a plausible political or polling-based argument that repealing the middle class tax cuts would play well in the general election. That’s the point made by Paul Krugman in his October 17 column, “The Sweet Spot”. Krugman, of course, sees the Bush tax cuts and associated fiscal policy as entirely reprehensible if not criminal in nature (he quotes economist George Akerlof to the effect that Bush administration budget policies are “a form of looting”). Still, Krugman rightly points out that:

[T]hose who want to restore fiscal sanity probably need to frame their proposals in a way that neutralizes some of the administration’s demagoguery. In particular, they probably shouldn’t propose a roll-back of all of the Bush tax cuts....By leaving the child tax credits and the cutout [that reduces the tax rate on some income to 10 percent from 15 percent] in place while proposing to repeal the rest, contenders will recapture most of the revenue lost because of the tax cuts, while making the job of the administration propagandists that much harder.

DR completely agrees with this assessment. And–surprise, surprise–it now appears that quite a few Democratic primary voters do as well.