Republicans Need To Look at the Numbers Before Deciding to Abandon Conservatives Again

Here are some numbers you may have seen from this week's exit polls regarding ideological self-identification:

Moderates - 47%
Conservatives - 32%
Liberals - 21%

This is virtually identical to the 2004 numbers, with moderates increasing by 2% and conservatives shrinking by 2%.

So Republicans should forget those nasty conservatives and get squishy, right?

Wrong.

Moderates in 2006 broke:

58% Democrat
38% Republican

That's a huge Dem advantage of 20 pts, right?

The problem is that parties tend to attract moderates at the expense of the base.

This is less of a problem for Dems moving right because the number of self-identified liberals is so small (1/5th of the electorate). It's a bigger problem for Republicans because the conservative share is much bigger (1/3rd).

Moreover, liberals tend to be very reliable Dem voters and conservatives very reliable GOP voters.

Given an 11-pt self-identification conservative advantage, this means that even when moderates break 20+ pts for Democrats, Republicans still net out more votes by capturing 29% more of the conservative vote than Democrats do (47% moderates in electorate & 20% moderate-Dem advantage = 9.4% electoral advantage / 32% conservatives in electorate = 29% conservative - Republican advantage needed to counter). Another way of saying this is that the GOP needs 71% or better of the conservative vote to counter moderates breaking Dem at 58-38% as they did in this election.

What's more attainable for Republicans---locking down 71% or better of the conservative vote or getting the squishy moderate vote to something substantially better than 50/50 in the GOP's favor?