WASHINGTON — In American politics, this might be the year that the center strikes back.
For six years, President Bush and the Republican congressional majority have governed behind a distinctive political strategy that focuses on mobilizing their hard-core supporters with an aggressively conservative agenda, even at the price of straining relations with moderate and independent swing voters.
Indeed, key GOP strategists argue that in this polarized political era, so many Americans have hardened in their loyalty to one of the two major parties that hardly any swing voters still exist.
But this year it appears that reports of the death of the swing voter are premature.
In races in virtually every corner of the country, key Republican House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates are facing imposing, sometimes cavernous deficits in the traditional center of the electorate, among voters who describe themselves as independents and moderates.
If that trend holds through Tuesday, it may not only sweep Democrats into control of one or both chambers of Congress, but could also ignite a debate in Republican ranks over the continuing viability of the base-centered strategy devised by Bush and key advisors such as Karl Rove.
"You can make a more realistic assessment of this when you see where the losses are, but [the message] is going to be that swing voters still count, and sometimes the more you cater to your base, the more you turn off swing voters," said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Stanley B. Greenberg, a veteran Democratic strategist who dueled with Bush's team in 2000 and 2004, is even more emphatic: If the election results follow the trajectory of the latest polls, he says, "I think their whole model is going to lay shattered in pieces."
Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, the campaign manager for Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, disputed the suggestion that the administration had "ignored or not focused on swing and independent voters" in its political strategy.
"A huge part of my strategy has been to work on expanding the party," Mehlman said, through systematic outreach to Latinos and African Americans, and the use of advanced "micro-targeting" technology to find GOP-leaning voters in predominantly Democratic communities.
