The one possible hope the Tea Partiers in the house might have is that somehow they will win the messaging game, that they can get enough of the conservative and moderate public to buy the pitch that they are not the ones shutting the government down but that they are the ones hoping to come to a negotiated settlement somewhere between all their demands and passing a clean bill - one that merely partly defunds or delays Obamacare “in the name of fairness” … that the President and the Senate Democrats are the ones who are inflexible and the ones responsible for the stalemate.
This op is not asking to debate the truth or insanity of that position; it is asking the TMs to handicap the odds of some sizable numbers of non-Tea Party conservatives and moderates buying that argument as this goes on.
Pretty damn low, I’d say. Less than 5% chance, I’d guess.
Fox News is certainly trying to help, though. This morning at the gym, I saw some talking heads on FN complaining that 95% of the media was laying the blame for the shutdown at the GOP’s feet.
In the Venn Diagram of “People who are exposed to the messaging and knowledgeable enough to even process it” and “People who are undecided about whose fault this is,” the overlapping circles are like six guys in Ohio who know who John Boehner is but haven’t been following politics because they’re too busy.
Messaging is waaaaaaaaay overrated as a causal factor of public opinion.
So I would define winning the messaging game as keeping one’s activist base on board, and maybe maybe maybe winning over a small percentage of high-information moderates or undecideds. And by that metric, I think the GOP’s messaging is working fine.
You can usually get 10% of the people to believe anything. I think most conservative Republican voters will reflexively blame Obama and the Democrats. That should get you at least 25%.
Right. TPs are in that corner as a given and even if they don’t buy the line they likely support the action, at least publicly. Liberals clearly are on the other side. The people in question are conservatives who are not TP, moderate Republicans, and those whose affiliation is loose at best. The tactic to try was to offer piecemeal funding and dare Reid to not fund kids cancer research as a stand alone. Does that approach gain any traction? Does it work to any significant degree to make it appear that the House GOP is wanting to offer things and that the Democratic Senate is stubbornly refusing to work with them? Debaser’s answer as I understood it was that if he as a Tea Partier doesn’t buy it then likely only a few in the middle, maybe 10%, will.
Yeah, but I was answering how many “moderates” would buy the line, not Republicans. I was assuming moderates = independents.
I guess it depends on how you define moderates? Moderate voters in general? Moderate republicans? Moderate Tea Party people?
You know the old rule about politics. Everyone considers themselves a moderate because everyone knows some sonofabitch who is even crazier than they are.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but you have just become too left-wing for the Tea Party. I think at this point, Ted Cruz has declared that he is the ONLY one who is pure enough - everyone else needs to adhere to his standards.
Technically, I think Cruz and Norquist are in a slapfight over which one of them is the true conservative. It’s like Highlander crossed with the Three Stooges.
But the question wasn’t “what percentage of people are going to buy it?”; it was “what percentage of likelihood is there that enough people will buy it for the TP to win?”
The OP requested “the TMs to handicap the odds of some sizable numbers of non-Tea Party conservatives and moderates buying” the argument that “the President and the Senate Democrats are the ones who are inflexible and the ones responsible for the stalemate.”
All these low percentages.
Please turn to First Menckens: No one has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
