What is mainstream?

I was wondering today what constitutes mainstream.  You hear politicians, pundits, the media, and others all talk about mainstream America.  When this is used, they are usually talking about what they consider to be views that are somewhat consistent with themselves.  After all, they can't really be talking about anything else...can they?  Is there some kind of mainstream out there upon which a politician or someone in the media can cling to in order to justify their positions?  How would one define mainstream even?  I don't know, but it seems to me that mainstream constitutes something upon which at 50.1 percent of Americans can agree on. The dictionary states that mainstream is "the principal or dominant course, tendency, or trend". Therefore, I see many things in our society where one could call something mainstream...things in pop culture...slang...etc.  However, politics and political positions don't seem to be one of these things.  So, I did a little research.

One of the first articles I found was this one.  It is an article discussing a Gallup Poll on the political leanings of Americans.  It is flawed in one glaring aspect.  It only condsiders those who self identify as conservative, liberal, or moderate and only those who self identify with Republicans, Democrats or as Independents.  However, it is a very interesting starting point for my research.

So...it seems that, as of 2011, Americans self identify as 40 percent conservative, 35 percent moderate and 21 percent liberal.  Does this give us a "mainstream"?  With 300 million Americans, this means that 120 million Americans identify as conservative, 105 million as moderate and 63 million as liberal.  However, this still doesn't give us a 50.1 percent anything.  One could argue, based on this, that there isn't a mainstream, or at least there certainly isn't a liberal mainstream, but there is more to this than that, isn't there?  After all, do these identifications translate to political affiliations?  What is the number of Republicans, Democrats, true independents, Socialists, Communists, Libertarians, Anarchists, etc.?

A Rasmussen poll, here, sheds some light on this question.  As of April 2012, this poll shows that 35 percent of Americans identify as Republicans, 33 as Democrats, and 32 percent are unaffiliated with either party.  Unfortunately, this doesn't tell us much about the unaffiliated group, which I think would shed a huge amount of light onto the question of mainstream.  Obviously, neither party can claim to be mainstream.  After all, while the Republicans currently have a slight edge, Democrats have historically had an edge.  None of that really means anything though because the unaffiliated group has just as much power, as a block, as either of the two parties since it has just as many people.  Therefore, there is no way either party can claim the mainstream.

Then there is this interesting tidbit.  USAToday actually looked at the registered voters in the various states and found that there are 42 million registered Democrats, 30 million registered Republicans and 24 million registered independents.  In 2008, there were nearly 228 million Americans of voting age.  Accounting for various reasons why someone couldn't vote (they've been convicted of a felony, etc.), I'll round down to about 220 million.  That means that only 96 million are registered?  Probably not, because a lot of states allow you to register as "unaffiliated" which isn't the same as "independent".  However, not knowing USAToday's methodology, it is possible that this is what that means.  This is why it is important to look at "registered voter" numbers at election time rather than overall numbers.  However, this is a rather poor indicator of our political system.  Consider this.  In 2008, there were 220 million people who were eligible to vote.  Of those people, 69.5 million voted for Obama, 60 million voted for McCain and 2 million voted for some form of "other".  Therefore, 132 million people voted, give or take.  That's about a voter turnout of 60 percent.  The official number for that year is 58.3 percent.  This is rather interesting.  It seems the one thing we can say exists in the mainstream politically is that a majority of people vote.  But that isn't saying much.  When you analyze these numbers, it means that nearly 42 percent of the people who can vote, decided it was too much hassle to bother.  That means, rather than Obama getting 53 percent and McCain getting 46 percent, it should really look something more like this:

Obama                         31.6%
McCain                        27%
Other                            .01%
Not participating           41.39%

So, we can't even get mainstream here.

It seems to me that whenever you hear someone talking about the opposition not being mainstream or themselves being mainstream, you can almost certainly know that they are lying.  The one thing that someone might be able to say is that a particular position is mainstream.  No political party or ideology can claim to be mainstream.  They may claim historical realities or precedents, but they can't claim mainstream.

So, what is mainstream?  Let's look at a few individual positions as examples of what could constitute mainstream America.  A Gallup poll found that 50% of Americans identify as pro-life while only 41% identify as pro-choice.  That could suggest that the mainstream is actually anti-abortion.  Of course, I don't think anything that is this close could constitute mainstream, but that's just me.  However, this doesn't tell the whole story.  The same poll found that 51% think abortion is morally wrong while 38% find it morally acceptable.  That is close to how people self identify.  More from this poll shows something even more interesting.  It seems that only 20% believe abortion should always be illegal, 25% think it should be legal in all cases for any reason, and 52% think it should be legal under "certain circumstances".  In other words, 52% said there may be at least one justifiable reason for abortion, but abortion at any time for any reason or banned outright is not acceptable.  Therefore, I'd say you do have something mainstream here.  The mainstream is clearly a compromise position.  Sure, 72% are opposed to abortion on demand, which is why you'll hear abortion supporting politicians say things like "it should be rare but legal" because they also know these numbers and that  77% think it should be legal in some form or another.

Another issue to look at could be the war in Afghanistan.  What is the "mainstream" on that topic?  Well, it seems that 59% of Americans believe going there was the right thing to do, with 35% believing it was the wrong thing to do and 6% undecided.  This shows a clear trend that people still support going into Afghanistan.  However, this gets a little bit more dicey when it comes to whether we should continue to be there now.  24% say we should follow the current 2014 withdrawal timeline while 21% think we shouldn't have any timeline at all and remain there until the mission is accomplished.  This includes 4% who are undecided as well as 50% who think we should withdraw faster than the established 2014 date.  So, that means that 74% favor withdraw now or in 2014 or somewhere in between while only 21% think we should stay.  So...we support the war, but we support withdrawal.  Okay, there goes a typically wishy washy outcome to complex issues.

And there you have it.  The real reason there is no mainstream America is because issues are complex, not cut and dried.  This is part of human nature as well.  Nonetheless, we might be able to form consensus on issues if we didn't have politics getting in the way, but as long as there are only two dominant political parties and as long as we insist on categorizing everyone into the conservative, liberal and independent ideologies without having a real understanding of the nuances involved, we will never be able to move away from the partisanship and the deadlocked bickering that exists in Washington.