But plainly voters judge presidential candidates first and foremost by party ID and general policy preferences, and secondarily by personality traits. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I do it too. Don’t let dumb poll questions persuade you otherwise. ~Kevin Drum

Drum is mostly right, though I think he overstates the importance of policy preferences for determining voting preferences.  Policy is a distant second to factors of identity.  This can be as simple as party identification, or it can be layered with many different symbolic elements in a candidate’s campaign to which voters respond.  An important thing to take away from this is that American electoral politics is actually “tribal” and it is based in voters’ sense of identity.  The candidate himself may add a personal appeal on top of this, or he can detract from it by having a very poor campaigning style, but a weak candidate appealing to the symbolism that can be embraced by the majority will usually win over a hyper-charismatic figure who lacks the symbolic connections to the voters.  

For example, I would guess that relatively few voters know, and even fewer care, about the details of Sam Brownback’s actual views on the Iraq war.  Many conservatives, aided by the tendentious Andrew Sullivan, as well as Republican and Romneyite bloggers, will now claim that Brownback is “antiwar” because he quibbles with the new battle plan, and they will actively oppose his candidacy because of this perception that he is somehow “weak” and “not one of us” on a question pertaining to the war.  Only indirectly is the actual policy question involved in the decisionmaking here.  The policy issue could be anything at all–what matters to these voters is not the substance of the issue, about which they know little or nothing, but the image of party loyalty or lack of party loyalty.  (Incidentally, this is also why McCain, who is the most reliably conservative of the Terrible Trio, for whatever that’s worth, suffers so much at the hands of activists.)  In other words, solidarity with other Republicans, the tribal “us,” is far more important in determining who is a “good” candidate on the war and who is lousy.  The response to Lieberman among progressives is exactly the same.

This is one reason why political efforts such as Unity08 will go nowhere and really should go nowhere.  Premised on a related false assumption that most voters don’t care about divisive issues and don’t agree with the two parties’ attention to their respective “bases,” Unity08 believes that the center is unrepresented in American politics and that the system is held hostage by the “extremists” in both parties.  This is patently false.  Ask a Republican voter if he thinks his party leadership is held hostage by restrictionist forces in the party “base” and watch him either laugh bitterly or weep in frustration.  Rarely has elite bipartisan consensus been more powerful and more stifling than it is today, and Unity08 diagnoses the problem as a lack of partisanship and difference! 

Rarely has our politics been more celebrity-centered, personality-driven and less issue-oriented than today, and yet the same boring “good government” centrists will probably hold up the poll results Drum mentions as proof that voters are concerned more with character than issues.  They just want a good guy!  It doesn’t matter what he believes!  Well, if it doesn’t matter to most voters what an honest candidate believes, something like Unity08 suddenly appears to be a credible operation. 

But even this claim about voters preferring honesty is clearly untrue.  No one in politics is more honest than Ron Paul, and virtually no one in the current presidential field is more shady than Giuliani, yet their respective standings in the polls do not reflect this supposedly deep desire on the part of voters for honesty.  For his supporters, Romney’s deceit is almost a political asset.  

These claims about issues and partisanship are all part of the centrist trick, part of which is to convince as many people as possible that a focus on issues can only be divisive and negative, both of which are supposedly bad and contribute to a “poisonous” political atmosphere.  For the centrist, no disagreement is so fundamental or real that it cannot be massaged into consensus, which means that they think that any strong disagreements must be manufactured and encouraged by party leaders for narrow advantage.  If you actually think that party and issues are not terribly important to voters, you will very easily fall into a habit of thinking that partisanship and strong disagreement over policy are the problems in our politics and you will start to think that these “problems” are things that the voters despise.  But you would be wrong to think this.