And the cookies are not a lie... at last night's meeting, we had Thin Mints - Edit 1
Before modification by Isaac at 15/03/2012 10:00:26 PM
Though normally it's homemade, still thin mints and those coconut and caramel striped Samoans are my favorite girl scouts cookies.
We will get a lot, first, voting for someone in '08 doesn't imply deep passion, probably a good 20% or so of the people who vote really pretty much shrug win or lose. Many voted for him in a spirit of change or feel good, and that ship has mostly sailed. McCain was old and not charismatic, and Palin fired up a lot of the base but scared many off, this will likely not be the case this time.
Now, of actual people who genuinely supported him, will we get converts? Sure, we always do, a pretty large portion of Republicans are ex-liberals, often very passionate ones. Republicans consistently having a larger proportional share of older voters is likely not caused by republicans registering later, and I know plenty including myself. I know a lot of dedicated and active republicans because I'm really not joking about the meetings, and anecdotally I'd say about a third to a half of them were former liberals.
In terms of liberal converts Tax/Economy usually doesn't play into it much. In my experience the most common is getting fed up with one's allies. Some learn to cope with it, some just drop out of active interest, some flee to the Greens or Libertarians, but an awful lot make their way to the GOP, and the flow is mostly one way.
Fortunately high unemployment numbers and record deficits make for short and clear sound bites.
Discussion of that would take a long, long time, so I'll leave at 'disagree almost entirely' and Bush came in when the economy wasn't too sweet either, one could argue that inherited recession or not, and the Democrats in many ways inherited the recession from themselves, Obama's had 3 years and not only failed to improve things but made them worse. We can discuss the details of that if you want but for our purposes here 'perception' is all that matters and people increasingly see this economy as being in Obama's lap.
Yes, I do actually know several friends or acquaintances off the top of my head who pulled the proverbial lever for him in '08 and are now solidly opposed. The #1 cited reason has typically been "I can't believe I voted for that guy".
We will get a lot of ex-Obama voters,
Will you? That's what I was asking, what would make someone who voted for Obama in '08 decide to vote Republican? I can see former supporters being disillusioned, even disillusioned enough to just not vote at all ("Ugh, what does it matter, no matter who I vote for, the banks and corporations have all the power, etc."
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. We will get a lot, first, voting for someone in '08 doesn't imply deep passion, probably a good 20% or so of the people who vote really pretty much shrug win or lose. Many voted for him in a spirit of change or feel good, and that ship has mostly sailed. McCain was old and not charismatic, and Palin fired up a lot of the base but scared many off, this will likely not be the case this time.
Now, of actual people who genuinely supported him, will we get converts? Sure, we always do, a pretty large portion of Republicans are ex-liberals, often very passionate ones. Republicans consistently having a larger proportional share of older voters is likely not caused by republicans registering later, and I know plenty including myself. I know a lot of dedicated and active republicans because I'm really not joking about the meetings, and anecdotally I'd say about a third to a half of them were former liberals.
I can't really think of a specific issue that would drive former Obama supporters to the right, though. It's not like someone who voted for Obama in '08 is suddenly going to go, "You know, I never thought about it before, but Planned Parenthood IS a symbol of utter depravity in our nation!"
The only thing I could think of would be under the general heading of "Taxes/The Economy," but there's two problems with that:
In terms of liberal converts Tax/Economy usually doesn't play into it much. In my experience the most common is getting fed up with one's allies. Some learn to cope with it, some just drop out of active interest, some flee to the Greens or Libertarians, but an awful lot make their way to the GOP, and the flow is mostly one way.
1) It's hard to be passionate and informed about the economy in any specific sense. Most people do not have economics degrees (including me), so people's opinions tend to get boiled down to sound bites such as "The 1%," "Trickle-Down," and all the rest. That is, if The Economy is an important political issue to you, you're unlikely to switch sides, simply because you don't know enough about it.
Fortunately high unemployment numbers and record deficits make for short and clear sound bites.
2) The Republicans HAD their taxes/economy plan implemented, under Bush, and suddenly we were in a recession. I'm not saying that Bush caused the recession. I am saying, though, that it'd be hard to get someone to switch from Obama to the GOP on the basis of the economy, because we just HAD 8 years of Republican economic policies, and it didn't seem to have a noticeable benefit.
Discussion of that would take a long, long time, so I'll leave at 'disagree almost entirely' and Bush came in when the economy wasn't too sweet either, one could argue that inherited recession or not, and the Democrats in many ways inherited the recession from themselves, Obama's had 3 years and not only failed to improve things but made them worse. We can discuss the details of that if you want but for our purposes here 'perception' is all that matters and people increasingly see this economy as being in Obama's lap.
So, can you think of anything that would cause someone who voted for Obama in '08 to suddenly go, "Hm, I guess the Republicans were right about that all along?"
Yes, I do actually know several friends or acquaintances off the top of my head who pulled the proverbial lever for him in '08 and are now solidly opposed. The #1 cited reason has typically been "I can't believe I voted for that guy".