As we brace ourselves for another huge election year, the Weekly Standard‘s Jay Cost asks us to consider four “enduring truths” about American elections: The two parties have long been roughly equal in strength. Strong partisans do not dominate the political process. The swing vote is decisive. Parties must refine their messages to persuade these swing voters.

In the end, this is a big way that parties go from defeat to victory: they really don’t alter their basic beliefs, but they refine their presentation of them, depending on the preferences of those swing voters in the center.

… [T]he Democratic leaders and liberal opinion makers forgot these rules in 2009-2010. Too many of them believed that the 60-year political dynamic had suddenly been displaced, that a new age of Democratic dominance was at hand, and that the party should go about achieving its long-standing ideological goals. Democrats passed an inefficient stimulus that favored party clients too heavily, then spent more than a year working on health care and cap and trade while real incomes declined and unemployment continued to soar. The public made them pay for their neglectfulness in the 2010 midterm.

Republicans cannot make the same mistake as the Democrats in 2012. What this means in practice is not that the party must forsake its conservative values, but rather it must find a nominee who can relate them to the practical worries of these non-partisan, non-ideological voters in the center, and make those voters believe that he will be the best choice for the future. Put another way, he must be a great salesman of conservatism to non-conservatives. And then in office, he must govern always with an eye to holding them in his voting coalition.