Perlmutter enjoys a 40 percent advantage among self-described moderates, who represented almost half of the poll respondents.

The poll was being conducted just as an outside Democratic “527” committee launched an attack ad saying that while O’Donnell once wanted to abolish Social Security, he now wants to privatize it.

O’Donnell got on the air almost immediately with an ad apologizing for writing an essay in 1995 as a 24-year-old communications director for Newt Gingrich’s Progress & Freedom Foundation titled “For Freedom’s Sake, Eliminate Social Security.”

In the ad, O’Donnell went on to say he would never abolish or privatize Social Security. And he countered that Perlmutter wanted to raise taxes and decrease Social Security benefits – a claim Perlmutter firmly denies. ~Rocky Mountain News

At first glance, it seemed implausible that a closely contested, formerly GOP seat would suddenly open up to a 17-point Democratic lead, but then you see that O’Donnell, the Republican, is basically holding on to registered Republican voters in his district (they make up 38%, he is getting 37% support) and has lost almost all of the independents.  If O’Donnell once wrote a paper calling for the abolition of Social Security, good on him.  However, he ran away from his old position so fast that it is clear that he knew the revelation would kill him with these “moderates” and “independents,” and apparently so it has.

Most “independents” are not, alas, wild-eyed folks on the green left and black right (people who take their politics so seriously they will not water them down for the sake of irrelevant things such as winning elections), but are instead the squishy, largely non-political folks who inhabit the center and say silly things like, “Why can’t we have more bipartisanship?” or “I like Colin Powell.”  When you want to find real “moderates,” don’t go looking for Joementum or John “What Torture? I Don’t See Any Torture Here!” McCain, who are the heroes of the establishment’s definition of moderation (where “moderation” equals unflinching support for all major establishment projects).  Instead take a look at people who will be scared out of their minds–not necessarily for any particular reason–at the prospect of someone privatising (gasp!) Social Security.  They are not frightened of this because they know anything about what privatisation of Social Security would entail, since they almost certainly do not know anything; “partial privatisation” would also mean nothing to them.  They are frightened of this because it is a strange, dramatic change in the way the government works and people in the “center” are far more of the stick-in-the-mud kind of temperamental conservatives than most people who self-apply the label of conservative.  These people do not oppose change for philosophical reasons, but simply because they have no idea what the change might do.  This makes them nervous, and they don’t like being nervous. 

For the “moderates,” whether something is broken in government or not no one should touch or change anything too dramatically or suddenly.  They love to hear the words “reform” and “consensus” and they really love rhetoric that hits the empowerment theme–Bubba was a master in manipulating these people with this kind of talk–but when it comes time to do the actual reforming, they don’t want anyone to be too hasty.  In fact, they would prefer that no one do much of anything very drastic at all, but they will always be the first to complain that the government “hasn’t done anything” about this or that.    

Because these people often hold the balance of power in contested districts, the fate of elections often turns on whether poorly informed, easily scared “moderates” will be stampeded into one party’s corral or into the other’s.  To do this, all it takes is to suggest that your opponent is some crazy radical who wants to start abolishing things, and if he wanted to abolish Social Security, he must want to make you insecure, and there is nothing that “moderates” value more than having their sense of security reinforced. 

This is why terrorism worked well as an issue for the Red Republicans for four years and why the so-called “security moms” rallied to their side, and it is also why the “moderates” will start rushing in the opposite direction when GOP candidates and the GOP majority no longer fill them with confidence and make them think that they are becoming less secure.  Whether income inequality, Iraq, immigration or specific attacks on policy questions like this one foster that feeling of insecurity, the Republicans now stand to lose on the basis of the same largely irrational response of “moderates” that brought them victory in the past two elections.