Who’s in ‘political center’?

As the 2012 presidential race hits running speed next month, we will hear plenty about whom voters in the middle are most likely to support. I, as a political moderate, am curious about the answer and will do my fair share of cajoling the candidates to not forget voters in the center.

But what exactly does the center mean? Who lives there?

The truth is, the center is not a monolithic community. When we hear about candidates appealing to the middle, which often happens in general elections when campaigns worry about voters not aligned with either party, it’s important to understand the competing players.

Largely, and certainly historically, two types of voters occupy the center. And they differ significantly.

First, there’s the social liberal-economic conservative voter, who does not line up neatly these days with the Democratic or Republican Party. This camp tends to be comfortable both with equal rights and spending reforms.

You will find people in this camp who represent a strong-government conservatism or a reinventing-government liberalism. In political terms, they are either moderate Republicans or centrist Democrats. They are not generally represented by their party’s mainstream, even though they recently had attractive options in John McCain, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Economic populism

Such folks are different from the center’s second major set of residents: Voters who combine a cultural conservatism with an economic populism.

These centrists pit the people against the powerful, so they are equally skeptical of cultural and economic elites. Think of them this way: They don’t like Hollywood, the media, pointy-headed professors or Wall Street.

This group largely has been more comfortable with Democrats, going back to William Jennings Bryan. The Great Commoner, as the former Democratic presidential nominee was known, railed against powerful financiers and evolution in the early 1900s. Later, George Wallace led them. More recently, they’ve popped up in the Perot movement of the 1990s, the Mike Huckabee GOP presidential campaign in 2008 and among Blue Dog Democrats in the House of Representatives.

Of these two groups, the cultural conservative-economic populists are more likely to play a major role next year.

For one thing, the social liberal-fiscal conservatives are without natural presidential contenders to energize them. Barack Obama appealed to them when he started out in 2008, but the president’s gone full-bore populist. These moderates are too much a part of the professional class to be populists.

Newt Gingrich could win some social liberal-fiscal conservatives, but his personal liabilities are too great to attract many of them. Likewise, Mitt Romney could have won over this group if he had campaigned the way he led Massachusetts as governor. But he has jettisoned his past.

Here’s another reason cultural conservative-economic populists may gain the upper hand: The Occupy Wall Street movement is giving working Americans a way to express themselves. Forget the attention to the movement’s hippie-like tent cities and think of the issue driving it: the wide gap between the rich and everyone else.

Culturally elite

Obama is trying to address that phenomenon with his born-again economic populism, but the ex-University of Chicago law professor is too culturally elite to speak for them.

So are Gingrich and Romney, and the GOP pack is doing a pretty good job seething against elites. Rick Perry, Ron Paul and Michelle Bachmann especially seethe well. Perry, Bachmann and Paul aren’t likely to get their party’s nod. Like Sarah Palin before them, they are driving the GOP away from its establishment and business roots. As a result, the Republican Party may look more enticing to cultural conservative-economic populists next year.

The question is, will Republicans lose their disdain for government to win over the descendants of Bryan? Many economic populists may be culturally conservative, but they want government protecting them against the elites.

So that’s the setup for the center. Competing voices live there, and I’d bet on the populists being the dominant force next year.

William McKenzie is an editorial columnist for The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.