This Nate Silver piece was refreshing to read. Silver blandly and calmly, relying on numbers and dispassionate analysis rather than punditry or opinion, just destroys the “both sides do it” nonsense in terms of how far Right the GOP has gone at the state level:
If the states are laboratories of democracy, then the Republican Party’s research pipeline has run dry. Moderate Republican governors, a thriving species before last year’s elections, are all but extinct.
Here, for example, is how the comparison looks for current Democratic governors. (I exclude a handful of cases where OnTheIssues has not rated the candidate on enough issues to provide for a reliable estimate.) You see a fair amount of ideological diversity among the Democrats, from moderates like Mr. Beebe and Kentucky’s Steven L. Beshear to liberals like Ms. Gregoire and Deval Patrick of Massachusetts.
You also see that there is a correlation between the ideology of the governors and the ideology of the states: with one or two exceptions, Democratic governors in moderate or conservative states themselves tend to be moderate, while Democratic governors in liberal states are quite liberal.
Unlike for the Democrats, there is almost no ideological diversity within the group: essentially all of the current Republican governors are quite conservative, taking moderate positions on at most one or two issues.
In light of the bizarre GOP pledge to their unelected leader, Grover Norquist, I thought this was particularly striking:
Also unlike the Democrats, there is no correlation between the ideology of the governors and the ideology of the states. Whether you have a Republican governor in a fairly liberal state like Maine, a moderate state like Ohio, or a conservative one like Idaho, his agenda is likely to be highly conservative
BGinCHI
The GOP is not a party. Its tent is a clown car and the Very Rich are buying the gas and telling them where to drive.
The end of politics as we know it, and I feel like puking.
gocart mozart
This is true in congress also. Next to be purged for the crime of insufficient batshitness are Olympia Snowe and Orin Hatch (Orin FN Hatch!?)
kay
Do you think so? I think Nate Silver is a good sign. My hope is people like him make paid pundits unemployable, eventually. I don’t know why anyone would hire a talking head with all sorts of bias, conflicts and ethical issues to pull things out of his or her ass when they could hire someone who actually does objective analysis and adds value.
Wouldn’t it be great if you actually had to know something specifically and well before you got hired to opine, broadly?
The pundit free market will work! They’ll all be out of bidness. He’s the new model :)
slag
I agree, Kay, that I find the GOP’s fealty to unelected leaders to be bizarre but only in so far as I find the GOP’s entire policy approach to be bizarre. Seen in the light of their stated positions on government and democracy, the GOP’s persistent Heil Norquists/Kochs/JP Morgans are quite reasonable and consistent.
me
What kind of influence does Norquist wield outside the Wingnut Welfare circuit? Is it just that the Kochs and friends take Norquist’s pledge into account before signing donation checks, otherwise why would Republican politicians fall all over themselves to sign it?
BGinCHI
Kay, no, I meant the end of functioning politics as a practice, since one party is only pretending to be interested in governance. And pretending badly, btw.
I like Silver, for exactly the reasons you say. Boring scans as banal in this culture, which is why we have so many loudmouths blathering away on business channels who know fuck all about economy more generally.
It’s like letting a failed oil man run a major leage baseball franchise just because he has money and is politically connected.
It never works out.
kay
I do think it came to light this week in a way that it never has before, so that’s good. The polling on raising taxes was just so overwhelmingly positive, and they were so obviously frightened of Norquist.
I love the amnesia of the commercial media, too, regarding Grover. Norquist was up to his ears in the Abramoff scandal, which was not that long ago. and part of the whole “culture of corruption” in the GOP Congress. I love the careful way they avoid the stench that comes off that guy in waves. He’s BACK! Conservatives take the House, and look who’s running the show. Again.
General Stuck
Beyond The 2010 election, and its historical consistency with such mid terms, what we are seeing is what is left of a party whose ideas largely failed, and the conservative movement that died the very day that Hank Paulson went to congress with hat in hand, for a hand out to save the world from the glibertarian orgy that was built into our economic life over a 30 year span. And failed so miserably that the proudest of free trade administrations had to beg to save the plutocrats, and ultimately the peasants that labored for them.
I think the gravity of that event has been dumbed down very much from the wingnut media machine and its co-0ption of the broader MSM, for various reasons, the least of which not being media megacorps protecting their own. Keeping the bullshit philosophy alive, just barely. For a more head on frontal assault strategy of right wing operatives like Kasich, Scott, and Walker — and they are “operatives”, not standard politicians — to get themselves elected on hysteria and lies over a health care reform, and churn up racial worry from a black president. Things that are not “ideas” for governing to the benefit of anyone but true believers seeking to monkey wrench liberal institutions, like labor unions and medicare.
Now we see them, wads shot, their mission partly accomplished, though subject to repeal, and facing a lot of pissed of voters, many of which wanted so badly to be led by republicans, they turned off their brains from what their own eyes told them.
And then there is the always effervescent 27 percenters that live on sawdust and bile, and are tickled pink at the pain being inflicted on average folks.
Sometimes it seems like a mad mad world out there, with smaller destinies racing to see who wins first place in the stupid human derby.
They are like the hurricane from tea tard energy, small, and spinning faster than can be maintained, for very long.
Alex S.
@me:
I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a short story about ‘Grover Norquist’s day’ for a while now, but I never get a real plot. He wakes up, snarls something about drowning the government in a bathtub, complains about tap water and roads, and complains even more about taxes. That’s it, I really can’t imagine anything that occupies him for more than an hour each day.
Joshua Norton
his agenda is likely to be highly conservative
Nate is still enabling them all by using a reasonably mild word like “conservative” to describe their actions. More factual would be “bigoted”, “corrupt” or “insane”.
Nothing will happen until the word “conservative” suffers from the same negative connotation they’ve tried to hang on the word “liberal”.
gene108
Your forgot the anti-abortion / anti-contraception folks, who they also have to bow down to and take orders from.
Anyway, I saw the graphs and was initially confused about what he was trying to prove with those red dots in one place and blue dots all over the place.
After reading the attached narration it made sense.
All the Republican governors, who got elected in 2010 are very right-wing.
What is also interesting in the same link is how well each governor is polling. Many of the newly elected Republicans have bad favorable / unfavorable ratings in their states, while most of the Democrats are keeping their heads above water.
Even the serious Rick Perry comes in with a fav/unfav rating of 46/46, which isn’t great for a two term Republican governor, in Texas, where Republicans generally tend to do well state wide.
chrismealy
WTF? Gregoire a liberal? What? Is Nate Silver just making shit up?
Comrade Luke
@chrismealy:
No shit. That’s exactly what I thought too. She’s a classic Third Way democrat, and she’s (unsurprisingly) terrible at her job.
And for all the talk of the Republicans being a dying party, they won the House, could very easily take the Senate in 2012, and who knows about the Oval Office at this point given where the economy is going.
They’re pretty successful for a “dying party”.
patrick II
@kay:
Yeah, kay that would be great. Unfortunately they instead would hire the zombie john belushi to start a food fight if they could. Better ratings/sell more papers/get more views, whatever.
Alwhite
Not to be completely contrary but – so what?
It seems like the mushy middle, the ‘low information’ voter the douchbags of democracy here in the US only know 2 things:
Dems will raise your taxes
Republicans want you to be rich
As long as that brain damaged meme exists for these morons the Rs win more than they lose. How do we change that?
It will be interesting to see how the recalls go in Wisc. I had real hope that the SC election would have indicated that the Confederate Party had gone too far & hurt the brand but no, the teabagger won. Unless the Dems can really unseat the fucknuts they have targeted we have lost Wisc & emboldened them to even worse rapaciousness.
tofubo
kinda nsfw, but appropriate (scroll to the pic)
http://throughglassdarkly.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/forget-liberty/
Alwhite
@12 – see, that is how successful these scum sucking pieces of shit have been – anything to the left of Rudolf Hess is a wild-eyed liberal.
We are well and truly fucked.
General Stuck
They are still viable at campaigning for winning elections, but are deeply splintered and split for actually governing. We are seeing that play out with the debt crisis, and it will only get worse. They are not much more than fancy used car salesmen, at this point, with a still viable sales pitch, especially for people that are already pre disposed to want to believe them.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
I wonder how Nate characterizes his hero, Andrew “bull dog of the rich” Cuomo.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
You would never see a “liberal” blogger work with Norquist.
JPL
Mike Kay @ 19 ..So true.
stuckinred
Mike Kay
Bulldog is one word! Wooof!
General Stuck
From being a compulsive poll watcher, I am starting to doubt the conventional wisdom, that is usually sound, that it will be the economy, and what shape it’s in that will decide the 2012 election. At least with Obama.
He seems to be carrying on the very unusual ‘set inconcrete’ numbers that marked the final three years of the Bush presidency. There has been very little flux in his approval numbers over the past two years, regardless of what happens. There are little bumps and drops, but between say 52 and 45, no matter what happens. This is a sign of ideological hardening in this country.
And I agree that the wingers are not dead electorally, yet. But it also looks like a very large majority of dems, are sticking with Obama through thick and thin, in a still floundering economy.
So it will be up to, as usual, a handful of flaky independents that decide the election, and is mostly why Obama goes out of his way with the dead cat bipartisan approach. It will be a close election, again. And the state of the economy may end up deciding who wins. But it will be close in any case. I think.
Meredith
I think a Manhattan is in order.
jl
Details of the Friday nervous breakdown in the debt talks come out, and reveal who are the lying liars who lie all the time, except when they are too busy lying.
TPM reports this little detail:
Key detail from the collapse of the debt deal negotiations: At the last minute, House Republicans demanded that any deal include a repeal of the individual mandate provision in the new health care reform law, according to the White House.
Very, Very Telling
David Kurtz | July 23, 2011, 9:19AM
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2011/07/very_very_telling.php
And Boehner gets up there and claims that the Democrats ‘moved the goal posts’ because they wanted a shift of $400 billion out of a $3 trillion deal. And the House Democrats wanted that not out of the blue, but because they had decided to concede to some ‘adjustments’ (cuts) to Social Security and Medicare. These were going to be mostly cuts going to middle class and higher, but still the cuts would reach far down into the below 250K set. The additional share of deficit reduction the Democrats asked for was whopping 13% of the total deal, and in return for a big big concession by the House Democrats.
And Obama, bless him, said at the press conference that the ‘tic toc’ would be released later. That was unfortunate. Obama was very good at yesterday’s press conference, but he needed to lambaste Boehner and the GOP with specifics right then and there at the press conference. That would force our worthless and miserable corporate national affairs press to pay attention, and confront the GOP with it.
I fear now, as these details come out, showing who the lying liars really are, the lousy lazy corporate hacks who pretend to report the national news will have an excuse to ignore. It was from yesterday, don’t you know. Not happening right right right now.
stuckinred
Meredith
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
El Cruzado
I’m getting the impression that the Democratic governors are seeing their approval ratings raised a few points by voters who compare and contrast with the crazies next State that got into the governor’s seat.
jrg
That will never happen. “conservative” is a positive word. It brings to mind thrift and wisdom. It brings to mind conservation.
The problem is that describing “conservatives” (in the US political sense of the word) as “conservative” is bullshit. It’s like describing creationism as “science”. It’s nothing more than abusing a term to gank it’s credibility. It’s newspeak.
jprfrog
Like Joshua Norton, I think it gives these maniacs too much gravitas to call them “conservative”. (I am reminded of Carl Sagan’s question “Just what do conservatives think they are conserving?”). They are radical reactionaries, and among them are those who would not hesitate to violently pull down the whole system (with a little help from some far-left friends) so they could rule the ruins — authoritarian, tight-assed, angry, and potentially very dangerous. The raw material for an American fascism is lying all around, missing two things: a major economic collapse (with which they may soon provide us) and a really clever sociopathic leader, i.e. a Hitler.
(Palin and Bachmann don’t qualify — they are too blatantly demagogic). As in Germany in 1932, the oligarchs may raise such a leader thinking they can control him (or her) and be just as wrong.
Another thread I read recently cautioned the left who may be disappointed with Obama to focus their anger and energy on the real enemy, which is not the moderate Democrats. This is a notion I can heartily second. Reread (or read) the relevant chapters of “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and note the parallels. (Is it time to supersede Godwin’s Law? if the US goes into default and the world economic system collapses, I think it is past time.)
Marginalized for stating documented facts
Certainly backs up with hard numbers the general sense everyone’s got that the GOP has run off the rails into the far right. This looks like a classic example of what happens to cults when their crackpot predictions fail: the moderates flee, leaving only the extremists in the cult, so the cult veers off course into lala-land.
What’s baffling at this point is why significant numbers of voters continue to vote for Republicans. The GOP has been so consistently wrong and has wrought such obvious disaster with their policies over the last 30 years that it’s hard to believe sensible people would continue to vote for them in any numbers.
Davis X. Machina
@jrg: Attention, journalists — “Conservative” means “revolutionary”, and “Republican” means “Monarchist”.
It’s a simple paired-array thing. You could have your word processor do it as a macro, even. Or tweak your auto-correct to do it. Ask an intern, they’ll know how to do it.
You might just save the Republic.
Elizabelle
Meredith: Did you by any chance pen the excellent reader comment on Charles Blow NYTimes column today?
I saved it.
Davis X. Machina
@Marginalized for stating documented facts:
Region. Religion. Tradition. Family habit. All the same reasons why — except maybe for religion — why there are still Mets fans.
jl
We need to find alternative words for ‘reporter’, ‘press’, ‘journalist’, and ‘newsperson’. Those words just don’t fit what the Washington and other corporate national affairs media reporters do.
In conversation I have started to use the words ‘news actor’ for anchorpeople and pundits and the big time celeb reporter/analysts. Because that is what they are.
They all have their little trademarks, and leitmotifs and pony tricks they pull over and over. It is like the big studio days when the studio boss decided a particular part needed an Andy Devine or Slim Pickens type, and there were hordes of character actors who were aiming to be the next Andy Devine. Except in the movie business, it was honest work. For the press, it is dishonest work.
There anything in the BJ lexicon that would fit? Or could be adapted?
In sum, I don’t think Silver’s analysis will make a bit of difference. The little news tidbit from the WH that indicates Boehner was lying through his teeth about who ‘moved the goal posts’ won’t make a bit of difference.
I expect to see these news actors on air
lyingreciting their lines, business as usual, no matter what happens.jrg
Davis X. Machina: The problem is that you pretty much have to respect people’s wishes to be called by the name they give themselves. This is true for every other person and organization on the planet. To do otherwise shows bias, even if it’s well earned.
I think the only way to make the political term “conservative” a pejorative is to use the term itself in stark contrast to the way “conservatives” behave… Over, and over, and over again. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you have a strong anti-authoritarian streak), liberals lack the messaging discipline to do that.
Marginalized for stating documented facts
General Stuck:
But are you talking about the Democrats?
At this point, both parties’ ideas have largely failed. Obama/Clinton’s morally bankrupt “third way” triangulation split-the-difference has failed catastrophically. When you try to split the difference between ending the minimum wage and extending unemployment benefits, you wind up with the government crashing in default.
Joe Biden’s horrifically failed War On Terror is one of the great disasters of American history. It has cost us literally trillions of dollars, started us down the dark path to torture and illegal kidnapping and assassination of U.S. citizens, while giving us nothing in return. (Osama bin Laden was not found by all the War-On-Terror interrogation-and-torture illegality, he was tracked down by old-fashioned police work.)
Few people realize that Joe Biden is the original author of the grossly unconstitutional Patriot Act. In fact, Biden boasts about it.
While the rest of the world races ahead with high-speed trains and medical research and green energy, America remains mired with its infinitely growing worthless homeland police force, which couldn’t even catch a cold. Since 2001, America has plowed trillions of dollars into a useless military and a worthless homeland stasi, while our children go malnourished and our roads distintegrate and our cities collapse.
We need to remember that almost every one of the sitting Democratic senators and House members voted for the futile counterproductive and utterly pointless 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Bush and company deserve to be tried for war crimes as well as countless crimes of corruption and violations of the constitution. That doesn’t change the fact that contemporary Democrats like Obama seem to have no worthwhile ideas for new policies either. Obama has merely extended Bush’s insane policies, shoveling more money into endless pointless lost wars and expanding our already insane homeland stasi with more warrantless wiretapping, more intrusive TSA groping, more Gitmo prisoners, more illegal assassinations, more unconstitutional kidnappings.
Dennis SGMM
@General Stuck:
If it depends on the economy then Obama is in for the fight of his political life. His re-election will largely depend on whether or not the Republicans’ gerrymandering gives them enough electoral votes, that the economy has continued to be a disaster under his stewardship is a given.Yeah, it’s not his fault because the Republicans… Do you think that those voters who follow televised variety shows more than they follow politics are going to consider that?
Our party, IMHO, made a colossal mistake by not throwing every fucking cent that they had at state-level elections in 2010. It was a redistricting year and understanding the importance of that ain’t rocket science. Some states were lost to the Dems, no doubt about it, but not all of the districts within those states were incontestable. If Obama ekes out a razor thin victory in ’12 and finds himself dealing with Republican majorities in the House and Senate (We’re defending Senate seats on a two-to-one basis in ’12)that will be the sole fault of the leadership of the Democratic party.
ira-NY
We need more Joe Friday types, like Nate Silver, covering politics.
Oh, for a “just the facts ma’am” Sunday morning show.
Marginalized for stating documented facts
Dennis SGMM:
As far as I can tell, this seems to be the goal of the White House political strategists. They appear to view this outcome as a feature, not a bug.
The result? Obama wins and goes on to a celebrated retirement as the first billionaire black ex-president (can you imagine the speaking fees Obama will command? Just think of the sales numbers on his memoirs!), while the country disintegrates into near-civil war and economic collapse.
That works well politically for the guys in the White House, who want to be seen as the only adults in the room. It doesn’t work for anyone else.
opal
@Marginalized for stating documented facts:
Whatever. Nate Silver can kill you with his brain.
Violet
@jl:
In the UK they call a news anchor a “news reader.” I think that’s a great description because it’s extremely accurate. All they’re doing is reading the news off the teleprompter.
Martin
Uh huh. Worse than Bush’s policies? Because you only get to set policy when you’ve won the election. Winning elections is policy objective #1 in our system, like it or not.
OT: Amy Winehouse died. Totally did
notsee that coming.Alex S.
@Marginalized for stating documented facts:
Who would pay billions of speaking fees to a failed president with the economy in collapse?
Davis X. Machina
@Alex S.: He could start collecting those fees earlier if he just threw the 2012 election. Why wait 4 years?
Elizabelle
I’m not going to link to it, but this week Peggy Noonan has one of the most insane Wall Street Journal columns she’s ever penned. Through the looking glass and on down into the rabbit hole.
Walk on by.
Keith G
@Dennis SGMM
Indeed. And that oversight (including the lack of use of the Obama first-timers) will be seen as a key missed opportunity. The renowned players of long ball had their eyes elsewhere.
ABL
hear! hear!
(sidenote, i just looked up the origins of “hear, hear” and it means “”hear, all ye good people, hear what this brilliant and eloquent speaker has to say!””)
cool.
300baud
@Marginalized for stating documented facts:
Is that baffling?
I had assumed that it was tribalism, stoked by carefully manipulated fears. Well, that and an economic system that has shifted so that most people spend their lives laboring within one quasi-feudal corporate quasi-feudal oligarchy or another, so that toadying to the dominant is a way of life. Oh, and a mediocre public education system, one that prizes obedience and conformance to official answers. And perhaps the rise of the profit and loss statement as the measure of all things, including public service, education, and medicine has something to do with it.
Just guessing though.
General Stuck
No, it will be the fault of American voters, those that voted against their own interest, and those that didn’t bother to vote at all.
The point of my comment, that is backed up by poll results, is that there is ideological hardening in this country, we haven’t seen in my lifetime. Personally, I am fairly pleased with the conduct of dems the past two and a half years. They have mostly stayed together in congress and voted with their president. Which was a far cry from a Carter, and even Clinton his fist two years.
People vote republican because they identify with them, in some pretty primal ways. It takes a lot to shake that, and dems are limited in their affect on that status. They can always do better. Though the only real gettable votes are with true swing voters, these day. But it is just more rank fatalism to blame it all on dem leadership. Or even most of it.
Obama could be in for a fight of his life, if the wingers nominated a right winger with a tone of sanity, and a charisma along the lines of a Reagan, or even a Bush. It would be wingnut charisma, that I don’t pick up, but it works on the Goopers to wield them into a suppressed lockstep from top down leadership. Otherwise, they are truly wingnuts, flying off in several different directions at once. And it will be on full display during the stresses of the stretch run for POTUS.
Alex S.
@Davis X. Machina:
Now that you mention it, he could quit right now and blame it on the lamestream media.
jl
@47 You used to be able to get regular Noonan coverage at Wonkette, but I think they got tired of the jokes, or trying to make funny jokes from the same nonsense over and over. But if Noonan went out and got some new wild and crazy and totally insane tricks for her act, maybe they will cover it.
Otherwise, I won’t see it. Numberless other things, including nail clipping and small change counting and organizing, will have far higher priority.
opal
@Marginalized for stating documented facts:
I will be the first to cite him as a role model.
Sly
@Comrade Luke:
From 1970 onward it was much more difficult, compared to today, for a Democrat to win the Presidency than it was for a Republican. The South, in particular, was a constant problem, necessitating the candidacies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to win. Barack Obama was the first Democratic non-Southerner in 50 years to win a Presidential election.
2008 marked the end of a fairly long process driven by demographic changes; the South has become less conservative, and much of the population growth of the past twenty years has been fueled by the Midwest (mostly in the 90s) and West (mostly in the 2000s, also making those regions less conservative. People have been moving out of the liberal Northeast and bringing their pinko commie ideas with them to places like Virginia and Indiana. The demographic shift has basically flipped the conventional political dynamics of the 70s, 80s, and 90s on its head; the more traditionally conservative states like Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana are becoming battleground states when they used to be states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida.
Conservatives have the advantage when the field is limited and when turnout is diminished: one can scarcely call a midterm election in which 40% of eligible voters actually voted a tectonic political realignment.
This doesn’t mean that conservatism is dying, per se. It means that the movement is on life support, as it cannot win in its present state without appealing to demographics outside its traditional coalition. Do you honestly think that coalition will be amenable to branching out? I don’t. So for the next decade or so it’ll occasionally win midterms and Senate election cycles that disadvantage Democrats.
But they’ll likely not win any Presidential elections, because it’s going to be Mitt Romneys for the foreseeable future. Guys who might campaign conservative during primaries, but will turn on the movement in a heartbeat during general elections.
Davis X. Machina
@General Stuck:
That’s at most 5-8% of the electorate — at most.
Most ‘independents’ are hard partisans who don’t declare party allegiance to pollsters, but otherwise are indistinguishable from self-identifying Democrats and Republicans in their voting behavior.
Jeffro
jrg @ 37: or, we could all just start saying it with a sneer as conservatives did with “liberal” – enough consistency on that and we’d get it drilled into a few heads. But as you say, with message discipline and all that…=)
Yutsano
@Alex S.:
How Palinesque.
EDIT: FYWP.
General Stuck
No, they didn’t. When combined, dems in the senate and house voted a solid majority against the Iraq resolution.
The rest of your comment, I will just say, I don’t agree with nary a one of your viewpoints.
karen marie
jl:
I don’t know if it was Digby or someone else who started it, but during the Bush administration people were referring to them as “stenographers.”
Also, too, all this talk about the GOP being a dying party is starting to annoy me. I was promised they were dead after the 2008 election, and they’re still twitching.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
Yeah, Obama’s hippie punching pushed her over the edge.
General Stuck
I would put it at 10 to 15 percent, depending. But even using your numbers, it is enough to decide our recent POTUS elections.
Arclite
@ kay
I wish that were true, but the reason those pundits will always be employed is b/c the people who pay their salaries like what they write and say, not because they tell the truth or make sense. Logic and analysis have nothing to do with it.
Arclite
That’s a feature, not a bug. Whereas Dems govern to reflect the will of the people, Repubs govern to remake the world in their own idealized image.
karen marie
jrg: Co-option. Earlier today on NPR there was a guy being interviewed whose name I forget but he was one of the founders of Green Peace, booted out because others in the group thought his methods too aggressive. He told the interviewer he was a conservative, explaining that conservatives are people who want to conserve, protect, not destroy, like Republicans who falsely claim that title.
J.W. Hamner
What I find interesting is that many progressives wish Dems would be as ideologically rigid as the GOP. I understand the sentiment, but I don’t think I can endorse it.
jl
@60
” I was promised they were dead after the 2008 election, and they’re still twitching. ”
I think the current nasty reactionary and racist version of the GOP is a dying party, but the death will take more than a decade, as the minority majority of our current youngins come of voting age. And other youth who remember their formative years as a time when GOP policies effed up their lives.
So, 2008 kind of stunned them. Maybe hastened in some ways their long slow decline. But they are still strong enough to take us down if we allow the country to get tangled in their convulsions.
Dennis SGMM
@General Stuck:
This is the electorate with which we have to work. From the perspective of someone who’s done the door to door stuff and the phone banking for years, I would love to have an informed, lively electorate. We don’t. That’s been the stone that the Democrats have run aground on for decades. If anything, the electorate is more ill informed than they were when I started my modest activism forty years ago. Blame the media (I do) or anything else that you wish to blame. Our electorate is a fait accompli and the sooner that we Democrats learn to reach them with honest messages that make sense to them, rather than lecturing them about how stupid they are to vote for the other side, the more elections will go our way.
Citizen_X
@Marginalized for stating documented facts:
Um, by any chance did Parallel-Universe Joe Biden also shoot somebody in the face on a hunting trip?
Martin
Actually, the real gettable votes, the really big pocket of votes, is registered Democrats that don’t vote. That’s a quite large pool.
The GOP by running hard right are trying to ensure their base turns out. That’s it. 2010 was an example of that working well.
Dems have a much harder time getting their base to turn out mainly because there are so many more varied objectives for Dems – and they can’t get them all – and it’s really easy for the GOP to shut these down. Want to keep some Dems home? Force the Dems to choose between blowing up the country and repealing DADT. And, just like clockwork, the left blames the Dems for this, when the GOP forced the Dems to choose everyone over some.
I don’t mind the advocacy from the left nearly so much as I mind them blaming everyone in sight because they simply cannot grasp that politicians cannot simply invent their ideal reality.
General Stuck
Marginalized for stating documented facts
Citizen X:
Um, you do realize that Joe Biden wrote the original version of the Patriot Act in 1995, after the Murraugh Building bombing?
Biden tried hard to turn America into a failed police state back in the 1990s. It was only after 9/11 that the rest of the country became foolish enough and demented enough to actually go along with Biden’s crazy scheme and pass the illegal Patriot Act that Biden wrote back in 1995.
Tom Q
I’m with Sly above: from Nixon through Bush I, Democrats were playing on an electoral map that was tilted toward the GOP, and the ony way they could win was by squeaking through, as Carter did in ’76. But now the opposite is true: look at how narrow were both of Bush’s wins (or win, for those possessed of 20/20 vision), compared to the easy romps Clinton and Obama had.
Unfortunatelly, this doesn’t automatically carry over to Congressional elections, because of gerrymandering, the fact that so many Dem voters cluster around cities while GOPers are spread in rural districts, and the way the Senate is set up to advantage small states (who of us could name, beyond Orrin Hatch, the GOP Senators from Utah, Idaho or Wyoming? — yet they’re six automatic Republican votes, representing far fewer people than any number of Dem-represented states, to say nothing of California).
Add to that what was mentioned above: that the skewed turnout of an off-year election (esp. one at the depths of a recession) shouldn’t be used to judge an upcoming presidential face-off.
A few other things, responding to comments:
I don’t think the fact that both Bush and Obama stayed roughly stagnant for a year or so’s time is indicative of a frozen electorate, especially since Bush’s freeze was in the low 30s, whereas Barack’s has been flirting with 50%. If the two added to 100, I’d said there was a far better chance of that representing where the electorate stood. But there’s alot of play in there, that could lead to anything from a near standoff to a Barack blowout.
I don’t think next year’s election is in any way guaranteed to be close. Even were Barack simply to repeat his rough triumph from ’08, we’d see the margin expand a bit, because McCain voters, actuarially, have shrunk. And I think there’s a decent chance Barack will do better — because he’s unlikely to face a Republican as widely accepted by the American mainstream as John McCain, and because, oh yeah: by a lot of metrics, he’s been a very effective president.
To which some will of course rejoinder, but-but-the economy. A couple of things about that:
I don’t assume the economy will remain where it is or decline further. The past few months have seen alot of stresses on the economy: wildly soaring oil prices, massive cuts in state employment, and whatever uncertainty this debt ceiling standoff has provoked. The oil prices have already come quite a bit back, the state layoffs will be mostly in the past this time next year, and one way or another the debt ceiling fight will have been resolved.
Yes, there will still be unemployment that’s too high. But I think people are wrong to think the raw unemployment number is the end-all of economic discussion. A too-little-known fact is that the unemployment number in November 1984 — when it was Morning in America — was about identical to what it had been in November four years earlier, when Reagan was rescuing the country from Carter’s disastrous economic management. Public perception of the economy is based on the direction things are headed. If next Spring/summer sees decent job growth month after month, the administration will look great.
And that’s about all the GOP has to campaign against. By Lichtman’s Keys to the Presidency system, Obama has only lost 2 or 3 of the 6 Keys necessary for a loss (Lichtman is currently saying 3 because he doesn’t accept that Obama is charismatic…a judgment with which many would disagree). Even an active recession during the campaign period would only bring him to 3-4 negatives. I wouldn’t argue Lichtman’s system is infallible, but it has a pretty good record of predicting elections others missed for some time (like ’88, ’92 and ’04), and especially since it’s not a close call, I think it’s worth taking to heart.
jl
A very big and important group of ‘gettable’ voters are apathetic Democrats who did not turn out in 2010.
I think that problem is fixed in four or five swing states.
Not sure how many in other states have learned their lesson.
I will be trying to roust them. Hope Obama does not make the job too difficult. And, yeah, sorry, I have to blame at least some of the disappearing 2010 Democratic vote on Obama, since it is the Democratic leaderships job to get out its own voters, and Obama is part of the Democratic leadership.
People can yell about stupid voters all they want. But we have only about 2500 years of voting to clue political leaders in to the fact that inspiring them to vote is part of the political leader job description.
General Stuck
Well, yea. You can blame them some, that is fair, but the turnout for dem voters was fully normal for this type of election with a first mid term for a dem presnit, for both parties, for a very long time. Like since the beginning.
There are just a lot of voters who don’t usually vote in mid terms, and only the anger of a new president of the other party doing shit that pisses them off, end up turning out.
If you really need to blame some dem leaders for fucking up, you could start with Pelosi and Reid, not wanting to fight out the Bush tax cuts before the 2010 election. Obama wanted to, but they were worried about their blue dogs, that ended up losing anyways.
Dennis SGMM
@General Stuck:
I think that we’re mostly saying the same thing. If I gave the impression that voters are by and large ciphers then I wasn’t making the point that I wished to. Many voters are under informed, or misinformed or voting on the basis of perceptions of their chosen party that were formed a long time before both parties became what they are today.
The messaging part (I still dislike “messaging” because it’s become laden with a lot of freight) is, to me, the highest hill for the Dems to climb. I’d love to be so brilliant that I could provide an answer – that would make me rich beyond my dreams of avarice. The only conclusion that I’ve managed to reach is that the messages that make complete sense to us seem to make little to no sense with the not-us whom we’re trying to convince.
Cain
You guys should watch “Morning Glory”, it’s a funny movie but makes some poignant swipes at News and Entertainment.
Mnemosyne
@Marginalized for stating documented facts:
Been reading Free Republic and Ron Paul’s website again, have you? Or did you hear that on Glen Beck’s show?
Ah, but you’re so much more lefty than us, amirite? And just because Glen Beck said it doesn’t mean it isn’t absolutely true.
agrippa
#8
General Stuck:
You may be right; and, I hope that you are.
But, only about 50% bother to vote. The GOP gets 45% no matter what. They only need another 6% to win.
The people who vote Democratic have to get out and vote: the base vote is basically equal at 45% each.
Quiddity
That kind of binary voting is what you get when the press conveys only the most minimal information about the parties and candidates.