Compromise on Capitol Hill: Is it really what Americans want?

By JANE SASSEEN
Yahoo! News

Most Americans say they want members of Congress to forge compromises to solve the nation's problems, yet many are turning to candidates in this tumultuous election season who are disdainful of compromise.

By a large margin, 57 percent to 37 percent, Americans surveyed in the latest ABC News/Yahoo! News poll say they would rather that political leaders work across party lines, even if it means "compromising on important issues." It's a sentiment heard often across the country — and one that played a critical role in helping Barack Obama win the presidential election.

Yet voters have given the president little credit for the efforts he's made to cut deals with Republicans. At the same time, conservative candidates who are campaigning on the need for more ideological purity are enjoying the support of angry voters who are expected to turn out Nov. 2 in large numbers. The rebellion has been heavily backed by Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who has emerged as something of a hero on the right for railing against "watered-down Republicanism." He insists that the GOP would be better off winning a smaller minority that won't compromise on core conservative values rather than gaining a Senate majority if that means giving ground.

"The public is schizophrenic; they say they want compromise, but that flies in the face of the increasingly polarized candidates they vote for," says Greg Valliere, chief political strategist for the Potomac Research Group. "Barack Obama's experience is proof of that; he's been punished for his attempts at cooperation."

The phenomenon is particularly true for tea party candidates like Sharron Angle of Nevada and Rand Paul of Kentucky, for whom tradeoffs that emerge from Capitol Hill are seen as mushy and muddled and the source of many of Washington's problems.

And it's not just a Republican attitude: On the Democratic left, many disillusioned former Obama supporters complain that the president's biggest problem is that he has strayed too much to the middle.

"Tolerance for any deviation from party orthodoxy is at an all-time low," Sen. Evan Bayh -- a moderate Democrat from Indiana who is retiring this year, in part because of the polarized atmosphere on Capitol Hill -- recently told USA Today. "It used to be that principled compromise was thought to be a good thing. Now it's viewed as an act of treachery."

Indeed, despite their professed desire for compromise, voters hardly have rewarded President Obama for attempting to achieve it.

It's not that the majority doesn't believe him when he talks about trying to bring the parties together. Asked which politicians or political entities they see as more interested in encouraging cooperation rather than division, Obama was the only figure to score positively in the random-sample survey conducted for ABC News/Yahoo! News by Langer Research Associates. Some 59 percent of Americans believe he's working toward cooperation — nearly twice the 34 percent who said the same of Sarah Palin, or the 31 percent who think the tea party is more interested in cooperation than in division.

Yet with his party facing the prospect of rejection at the polls, and with his own approval numbers stuck below 50 percent for months, voters clearly aren't willing to give the president much credit for chasing that elusive goal.

So what accounts for the discrepancy?

For one, compromise may be the sort of thing that sounds better in theory than in practice. It's one of those nice, fuzzy, mom-and-apple-pie ideals, but compromise doesn't look so good when each side has to give ground to reach an agreement. Moreover, other priorities, like fixing the economy, may be more important now.

Valliere argues that it's naive to believe a mood of compromise will take hold, particularly in an ideologically driven time like today when there simply may not be a lot of room to find middle ground between many Republican and Democratic solutions on hot-button issues such as the economy, taxes or immigration.

That growing chasm is worrisome to voters on both sides of the aisle -- many of whom voice similar frustration with Washington.

"I think there are too many extremists on each end and not enough moderates in the middle to bring them together," says Steven Britt, 46, a veterinarian in Tallassee, Ala., who voted for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the 2008 presidential election. "What the Democrats are trying to do is 180 degrees from what the Republicans are trying to do."

Britt may be politically worlds away from Virginia Lynns, a 64-year-old retired teacher and lawyer from St. Paul, Minn., who describes herself as being "as far left as you can get." But when it comes to the lack of compromise, their views are much the same.

"It is just really more polarized than what I've ever seen," says Lynns. "I have never ever, ever, ever seen it so polarized. If a Democrat says white, a Republican says black."

Indeed, as the political debate has become more divisive, the support for compromise has waned somewhat. Sure, it still wins majority support at 57 percent. But in February 2009, 66 percent supported compromise in a similar poll taken by ABC News and the Washington Post. And ultimately, what many appear to want in a "compromise" is a deal that moves policy in the direction of their own beliefs.

"There's a very strong theme now within the polls that people want to see Washington work. They don't think it works, but they have very different answers as to what the solution is," says Taylor Griffin, a former McCain aide who is now a principal at Hamilton Place Strategies. "The rub is, they want to see it work -- but for their own interests. The two competing desires are at odds."

Another reason for the disconnect between what many Americans say they want and what's likely to happen come Nov. 2 : The desire to see politicians compromise is most important to those who define themselves as moderate or liberal. Among moderates, 62 percent would rather see compromise; 65 percent of those who describe themselves as liberal agree. Those numbers drop sharply among Americans who describe themselves as conservative: Only 49 percent of them value compromise over sticking to principle.

Conservatives are precisely the voters who are most energized and likely to show up at the polls this time around. Conservatives are most unhappy with the economy, and with the administration, and are therefore most motivated to vote.

Conservatives, many of them allied with the tea party factions, also have been the dominant force in the Republican primaries, which have offered up an array of more ideological candidates across the country.

And with fully 45 percent of them arguing that it's more important for political leaders to stick with their positions, they are in no mood to elect candidates who would compromise with what they see as the misguided policies of the administration and the Democrats.

Meanwhile, many Democrats, along with more centrist Republicans and independent voters, look likely to sit this election out.

"There is a surge of people who don't like the Democrats, the president or his policies who will be overrepresented, while those in the center will be far less likely to show up," says John Fortier, who leads the Election Reform Project, a joint project of the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution.

That trend holds plenty of peril for the president and congressional Democrats, who face a backlash that could cost them their majority in the House and even the Senate.

Yet there's also a longer-term danger in those numbers for Republicans, as voters move past this election and begin to focus on 2012. They may be staying home this time, but the broad swath of the electorate that has soured on both parties still claims to want compromise. Republicans are now poised to gain a large number of seats in the House and the Senate — if not outright control. If the Republicans are empowered but don't use their expanded role to work with the Democrats to resolve some of the country's pressing issues, they risk a backlash.

And after two years in which the strategy for congressional Republicans has been to stonewall much of the president's agenda, voters appear to have little confidence that they will prove able to do so.

Asked whether Republicans in Congress are interested more in encouraging cooperation or in encouraging division, only 31 percent said the GOP was interested in cooperation.

Not surprisingly, that number, at 79 percent, was highest among Democrats. But 58 percent of independents also believe that congressional Republicans are inclined to encourage political division more than cooperation. Even roughly half of all Republicans believe the same.

A "just say no" strategy may have worked to energize the base and conservative independents while the Republicans were largely out of power, but it may not be enough to attract the larger majority they'd need to build on whatever congressional gains they made or to take the presidency.

"After Nov. 2, the clock will start all over," says Michael Cornfield of George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management. "There's no predicting anymore who will have the advantage."

The question, of course, is how much room Republican congressional leaders will have to maneuver, if much of their electorate — and more than a handful of their newly elected members — continue to look down on compromise.

If they don't use their new authority to work more constructively with the Democrats, they risk ire from the moderates and independents they'll need in 2012.

But if they do, warns Valliere, they risk a sharp backlash from their newly empowered base. Many of them — particularly those allied with the tea party -- start with only limited loyalty to the party in the first place.

"Ultimately, Republicans have an interest in playing ball with Obama. If he moves towards them, they have a real interest in showing that they can govern," says Griffin. "But they don't have a lot of room to move. Their base won't allow it, and independents won't allow it."

Jane Sasseen is the editor-in-chief of politics and opinion at Yahoo! News.

METHODOLOGY: This ABC News/Yahoo News! poll was conducted Oct. 6-12, 2010, among a random national sample of 1,025 adults. Respondents were selected using an address-based sample design. Households for which a phone number could be ascertained were contacted by phone; others were contacted by mail and asked to complete the survey via a toll-free inbound phone number or the Internet. See details here. Results for the full sample have a 4-point error margin. Click here for a detailed description of sampling error.