This is a blog about Pennsylvania!
Greg Ip thinks we’ve hit peak Tea Party. We’ve known for a while that the Tea Party hasn’t brought any new voters into the electorate. The rump base of the Republican Party has merely traded their elephant hats for tricorne hats with tea bags hanging off of them.
My guess is that we’re seeing some of the activist intensity in the GOP burning out. The tea people feel like they had a big win in 2010, and now they’re getting complacent just like Democratic activists did after 2008.
May 23, 2013 By Jon Geeting Leave a Comment
There is so much wrong in this post I can’t even, but how are you going to compare John Callahan’s ward wins in a Democratic primary in a muni year to his performance in a general election in a midterm year?
May 22, 2013 By Jon Geeting Leave a Comment
In this era of tight budgets, cities are looking for ways to grow their tax bases without asking individual households to contribute more taxes. Here’s the first place they should look. Different kinds of buildings yield different amounts of property tax revenue per acre. Many areas limit residential development to just one house per acre. [...]
May 22, 2013 By Jon Geeting Leave a Comment
In this era of tight budgets, cities are looking for ways to grow their tax bases without asking individual households to contribute more taxes. Here’s the first place they should look. Different kinds of buildings yield different amounts of property tax revenue per acre. Many areas limit residential development to just one house per acre. [...]
May 13, 2013 By Jon Geeting Leave a Comment
The point of political blogging is not that you’ll directly reach so many voters that you’ll shape opinions about elections. The point is that for every couple dozen low-information voters, there’s a *political friend* who people ask who to vote for the week before an election. The point of blogging is to shape the opinions [...]
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Any serious analyst knows the Tea Party had no, 0, nil, effect on the 2010 elections.
The Progressive Liberal Elites lost it because their policies were abhorrent to the vast majority of the country.
Basically, Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Waxman, etc. screwed the pooch in a shorter period of time than any other group in the history of the world.
The Republicans won because they weren't the Democrats. A potted plant would have won in 2010 over the Democrats.
Find me one exit poll that bears out that interpretation of the 2010 elections. Just one.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1789/2010-midterm-elections-exit-poll-analysis
Now Jon, read the whole thing, especially the parts about Independent voters (certainly not the Tea Party crowd) flipping for Republicans.
And if you keep reading, you'll get to where it covers the fact that the people who voted Republican in 2010 still had a negative opinion of the party.
It happened in 2006, a wave in 2008, and again in 2010. If people aren't happy with the direction of government, they vote the incumbents out.
How many times have I said the worst mistake Republicans could make is thinking they were popular? Bull. They won because they weren't Democrats.
"Any serious analyst knows the Tea Party had no, 0, nil, effect on the 2010 elections."
What an idiotic statement.
Ask Mike Castle of Delaware if the Tea Part had any effect on the 2010 elections, just to name one example of thousands.
Koch Bros funded fake Teabagger poster?
I think it's a big mistake to read this as a rejection of the Democrats on ideological grounds. There's no evidence that the American people have well-defined internally-consistent political ideologies. The only observable ideology is real disposable income growth.
It also doesn't make sense to talk about "independents." The registered independents who showed up in 2008 were much more liberal than the independents who showed up in 2010. There's not significant overlap.
What you're definitely not seeing in these numbers is people who voted for Obama in 2008 switching their support to the Republicans.
I agree with you on this: If people aren't happy with the direction of government, they vote the incumbents out.
If the Democrats hadn't been scared of the short term politics and had passed a large enough stimulus, passed cramdown to clear the housing market, and succeeded in significantly reducing the unemployment rate, they would be much more popular right now. The lesson here is to pay no attention to the policies voters say they want, and keep the focus on doing everything you can to deliver the real disposable income.
@Anonymous, 2:59PM: did you make that whole line of bullcrap up, or are you just cutting and pasting from Redstate or one of the other teabagger circle-jerks. Taken at face value, your post implies that the American people are borderline retarded and forgot who spent EIGHT YEARS blowing up the country, running up debt, and starting wars after barely two years.
Then again, you ARE a teahadi, and you may just be projecting your own intellectual inadequacy on others…
As soon as Any mouse wrote "Progressive Liberal Elites" it was clear that whatever point was being made would be BS.
As Jon pointed out, the Dems lost in 2010 because they were not progressive enough.
Anon 10:02am, please please please keep believing that.
Whether you like it or not, there's about 10% of the country that agrees with you. Then there's 10% of the country that represent the whackjobs on the far right.
Then there's the 80% of us in the middle.