Moderate voters, the folks who inhabit the broad middle of the political spectrum, have not had a lot to cheer about recently.
In Europe, they have watched as political influence has shifted from the centre to the right and far-right in country after country. In the United States, the moderate middle has been overrun by Donald Trump’s makeshift army of truth deniers, spreaders of misinformation and single-issue zealots. In Canada, many centrist voters feel abandoned by both the governing Liberals and the opposition Conservatives.
The Liberals have moved briskly to the left since they lost their majority in 2019. They have been driven in that direction by events – particularly by the pandemic, which called for an activist, free-spending government, and by the need to lock-in the parliamentary support of the New Democratic Party. They left behind those nominally Liberal moderates who hold fiscal probity to be the hallmark of good government.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives, frustrated by three consecutive election defeats between 2015 and 2021, were moving steadily to the right, where votes were easy to bag, but couldn’t translate into enough seats to elect a government.
Instead of courting Blue Liberals and moderate Conservatives, the Harper-Scheer-O’Toole-Poilievre party doubled down on “gotcha” politics, of which Pierre Poilievre is the reigning grand master, and it distanced itself from the centre by denying climate change, rejecting carbon taxes, opposing national day care, waffling on vaccine mandates, being ambivalent on immigration, fighting gun control, promoting the expansion of the oil and gas industry, and calling for more, not fewer, pipelines. And, of course, cutting government programs.
Positions intended to appeal to the old Harper/Reform party constituency, they may serve to drive Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party out of business. But they do nothing to attract the kind of moderate Tories who produced two majority Progressive Conservative governments for Brian Mulroney.
What most moderate Conservatives want, at least the ones I talk to, is a realistic alternative to the Liberals. They would support a reasonable party with sensible fiscal and social goals, one prepared to invest in economic growth, to advance economic opportunities for women and minorities, to support diversity, and to embrace change rather than resist it. But the challenge of becoming a party with which moderate voters can feel comfortable seems too daunting for the re-invented Conservative Party of Canada.
There are rays of hope, however. Some appeared last week in the American midterm elections. The turnout exceeded all expectations. The Republicans’ vaunted “red wave” turned out to be a light drizzle. Election deniers lost as many races as they won. A Trump endorsement proved to be a mixed blessing. It helped the wealthy entrepreneur/author J.D. Vance (“Hillbilly Elegy”) to win a senate seat in Ohio, but it probably doomed another celebrity senate candidate, Mehmet Öz (known professionally as Dr. Oz) in the pivotal state of Pennsylvania.
Best of all was the record turnout in states where crucial issues were in play. In the hundreds of thousands across the nation, women (yes, men, too) flooded streets and polling stations to assert a woman’s right to abortion, regardless of what the U.S. Supreme Court may think.
In Michigan, the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who campaigned as a champion of abortion rights, sailed to re-election, and established herself as a potential presidential nominee. And Michigan voters approved a ballot initiative to entrench the right to abortion in the state constitution. In Kentucky, a state that has been among the most hostile to abortion rights, voters rejected an amendment to the state constitution to tighten the ban.
It seems as though the battle over abortion is moving from the courts, state legislatures and governors’ offices to the ballot box. That’s a better place for it.
What place does the future hold for Donald Trump? Many “experts” predict that the midterms will prove to be the end of the road back to the White House. I wouldn’t be so sure. Has Trump ever listened to experts? Has he ever succumbed to the predictable?
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com