When you say “vast majority”, you’re right, but it’s a little misleading, since if only 80% of his supporters still like him, he probably wouldn’t win again.
It’s not so much that people who supported him before would support the GOP so much as many of them wouldn’t vote at all. And as we see, when supporters stay home it can be almost as devastating as them switching.
“So my mellow fellow citizens, when you go into that voting booth on Tuesday…”
“Uh, Homer… that was yesterday.”
“Oh man, they already voted! And we lost! Oh man, I can’t believe we spaced on the date!”
The way CNN tells it, the main problem the Democrats had with Colorado was, the Republicans decided to run a mainstream candidate rather than someone closer to the Tea Party.
If you think young voters will be pushing for Republicans in droves, you are crazy.
Although I will say, once gay marriage is the law of the land and Republicans stop fighting it at every turn, they might actually be able to sway some of the under-30 set. That is a big issue for young voters and every time a Republican shouts “Fag!” a Democrat pops a champagne cork in celebration of the inevitable public backlash.
I’m sure that helped, but Dem turnout was at a 30-year low.
You underestimate the power of legal pot. LOL. But seriously though, gay marriage is important to young voters, but I’ve never seen everyday voters focus on the marijuana referendum to the exclusion of all else like I saw in this election. And this was with Rick Scott, a hated governor in many quarters, on the ballot. It’s as if putting marijuana on the ballot sucked all the air out of the room when the vote should have been about Rick Scott.
Democrats needed the young people who voted for Obama to come out and vote. They tried to get them by running against Obama. It was pure idiocy.
Yeah, but young people have been in large part disillusioned by Obama. He wasn’t what they were promised. They didn’t vote to elect a typical politician.
THe problems didn’t start in 2014, in 2012 Obama won something like 2 million fewer young voters. They didn’t vote GOP, but they did stay home even though he was at the top of the ticket.
I sincerely doubt it, because national politics are fundamentally different now than they were then. For one thing, parties weren’t nearly as neatly divided ideologically then, and there were plenty of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, and a lot more complexity (e.g. Kennedy ran as a stronger anticommunist than Nixon in '62), and I think local machine politics and backroom powerbrokering was a more powerful then than now. There hasn’t been a brokered convention in decades, and may never be again; if the voters of either party get ideological and really, really want to nominate a Ted Cruz or Elizabeth Warren, there’s little the leadership can do stop them.
There was also relatively little in the way of national media then, and what there was tended to be ostensibly nonpartisan. People now read and think only inside their political circles much more than in the past. Also as a result of that, I think regionalism is less powerful, or at least different: an urban St. Louisan is more likely to find commonality with a New Yorker than he is with a rural farmer from his own state.
Finally, you have the monumental influence of modern marketing techniques. Selling anything is a vastly different proposition now than it was 80 years ago, and politics are no exception. Back then, it was much more common for one company to dominate a sector for decades at a time, too. Not as much anymore. Packaging, segmenting, branding … all much, much more sophisticated and scientific, and makes it harder for anyone to maintain dominant market share.
And this is why liberals think that Republican voters are either multi-millionaires or idiots. Almost everything the average Republican voter doesn’t like about Obama is false crap they hear on Fox News or Limbaugh.
He’s deported more illegal immigrants and beefed up border security more than Bush, but Fox portrays him as having an open door policy.
Obamacare is working well, but after years of pounding on death panels, can’t keep your doctor, huge price increases, etc., Fox has gone dark on that subject.
There have been a hundred times more kids killed by guns this year than Americans who died of Ebola. But he’s portrayed as allowing an Ebola epidemic to sweep the country, and as wanting to confiscate everybody’s guns, when IIRC the most he wanted to do was ban 30-round clips for pistols and have better background checks.
And on and on.
They just make shit up (or deliberately twist a fragment of truth), keep pounding on it, and drop it only when it’s so obviously false that they would look ridiculous to stick with it, but they never retract it. So their viewers see nothing but negatives about Obama, and almost all of it is bullshit.
To be fair, Fox is very good at what it does. On the other hand, I never see the DNC doing much to counter it, and lots of Dems distanced themselves from Obama rather than defending him, so a pox on all their asses.
Sorry, but I think that’s just delusional. It’s not just Fox News that has furthered the narrative that the Obama administration’s competence is less than adequate. You can certainly disagree with that narrative, but it’s not something that sprung out of the right-wing imagination.
The democrats ran out of money to buy carrots with.
It’s not a bad analogy, with a little tweak. Democrats couldn’t buy enough carrots to overcome the imaginary sticks Republicans bought to threaten the voters with.
So if Rand Paul is the nominee, and he runs against Hillary on
… those won’t make inroads with young voters? And she’s going to hammer him on his leave-it-to-the-states, I’m-opposed-but-wouldn’t-enforce-that-on-people-in-other-states position on gay marriage, when she supported DOMA?
This is why parties in power fall out: you’re running against the cartoon version of who your opponents were four or five years ago, instead of understanding who they are going to be next time.
Don’t worry, they’ll be doing the same thing in a few years.
That’s a great point. One reason the Democrats lost which I failed to mention is that they were fighting the last war. They portrayed their opponents as extremists when they were almost all mainstream Republicans.
The Democrats already knew they were going to lose and why; I’ve been hearing predictions of exactly than happening since at least the 2012 election.
“Mainstream Republican” = extremist. They are an extremist party.
That’s a tough argument to make in a center-right country.
I think the only argument I can really get behind is the motivation. Republicans have that going for them: they get out the vote. Part of it is organizational. There are religious organizations and conservative issues organizations that push their membership towards the polls.
The liberals don’t have any real counterpart to these. Labor unions used to fill the role but they’ve lost most of their organizational power.
The other side of this is a negative one; conservatives motivate voters through fear. They create an enemy - integrationists, communists, mafiosi, feminists, street gangs, gays, immigrants, pro-choicers, secular humanists, terrorists, ebola victims - they personalize the threat (They’re moving into your neighborhood and coming after you and your family) and tell scared people that this election is their last chance to save themselves.
Not to mention the gerrymandering and voter suppression techniques.
On the motivation issue, of course both parties work to motivate their voters, but the Republicans don’t need to worry about it as much. They come out pretty reliably without extensive GOTV efforts.
But as for the politics of fear, I think Democrats rely on it a lot more. To listen to the Democrats, starting in January, birth control will be outlawed, police will start beating up young black men in the streets, immigrants will be deported, legal or not, and the Koch brothers will own everything.
This goes back to motivation. Republicans know what buttons to push with their base, but they don’t need to push very hard because the base is already going to vote. Democrats have resorted to increasingly alarming rhetoric targeted at specific groups that basically amount to “rich white men are coming to get you.”
Those would have mattered if the election was close. There was no voter suppression in Colorado and Democrats simply stayed home. Stayed home and didn’t even bother to mail in their ballots. You can’t make voting any easier than that.
And Republicans now have 31 governors. You can’t gerrymander that.
Again, Democrats don’t have to make major reforms in the way they do business to win in the future. It’s a basically healthy party. But to deny that they lost because they’ve been screwing a lot of things up over the last six years is to deny reality. Fox hasn’t just made voters reject Democrats by making shit up. The stuff that defeated the Democrats appeared in the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Show, and CNN.
Just govern better. It’s not really all that hard to do, if that’s where your focus is. If the Democrats govern well, they won’t need to worry about motivating their base, because independents will put them over the top. Instead of concentrating on Obama’s ideological accomplishments, like ACA, they should be taking the media stories of executive maladministration seriously and demanding that he do a better job. He’s got the brains and ability for it, but no one’s really pressuring him to focus his energies on it. The base is in denial about it.