It goes back to what most posters here recognize: to win the primary election, the candidate has to be acceptable to the social conservatives. The Republican party does not have control of the Senate because many centrist candidates (who would have won the general election), were defeated in the primary election.
Sean Hannity's on the "let's come around on immigration" bandwagon. Not surprising, since his schtick has always been about sounding reasonable while spouting bullshit. Santorum thinks Obama "got away" with doing nothing on immigration, also thinks the Dems like having immigration as a wedge issue. He's right!
And the crazy that works in House races isn't as effective in state-wide senate races. Just ask Akin and Mourdock.
It's silly to look at this as a major turning point in the battle between conservatism and liberalism. Is there a demographic trend that seems to favor liberals? Sure. But ultimately Americans are not blind loyalists. There's something they value more than party loyalty, and that's their cushy status of affluence. People will throw their president under the bus over the slightest sense of economic panic. What got Obama elected was the fact that he was getting results ... falling unemployment, rising markets, healthcare reform etc ... Without those results I'm confident that millions of those "brown" voters would of stayed home last week. And if Obama fumbles now there's no reason to assume the people won't punish his party in 4 years. It's the inherent characteristic of a 2 party system. The seemingly weaker party is always there to pounce on any mistake by the party in power. And people have short memories ... the longer a party is out of power the more people forget why they rejected them in the first place In the meantime it's great for us liberals to celebrate our demographic victories, but I wouldn't take anything for granted. Republicans have plenty of time to adapt to the new America. I see the evenly split 2 party electorate to survive for a long time.
It would be interesting to see the breakdown in voting by the size of one's employer. Anyone working for a large corporation knows that, although a 1.5% GDP growth is undesirable, the US economy is the best in the world right now, even better than China. But small businesses wouldn't see this.
I disagree. What got Obama elected was the threat of the tea-party types riding into town on Romney's back. I can't tell you how many people I know who begrudgingly voted for Obama, while heavily favoring Romney on the economy, for that very reason. Supporting amnesty, nominating Rubio etc. is not going to win over the Hispanic vote when there is a very loud, very visible, fairly large, vitriolic group inside the Republican tent who made it very clear that they don't think very highly of Obama's patchwork coalition. Unless the GOP leadership and nominee is seen to be taking a very hard line against them, they are not going to convince very many to switch allegiances.
Especially when 50,000 Hispanics are turning 18 each month. That's a lot of young potential voters that will probably skew Democratic right off the bat.
In what way does working at a "large corporation" imbue a person with greater economic wisdom than someone at a small company? I think that's the second time* I've seen one of your posts where you claim this and it's really condescending and most likely, utterly false. *Or maybe it's just the second time I've read this post.
I don't think it's a matter of smarts, but a matter of voting with wallets. I think what he's getting at is that larger corporations are feeling the benefits of the recovery before small businesses - not sure if it's true or not, but I certainly haven't suffered as much because of the recession, and I've (for the most part) been employed by large companies.
I've almost always worked for small companies and the only problem I had with the recession was when I voluntarily quit my job in Feb 2009 and didn't find another one until October of that year. To be fair, though, I didn't really start looking until June or so.
Peace Barbara. I'm just trying to understand why the vehement hate of some folks I know about Obama's handling of the economy. Because right now the US is doing better than any other major part of the world. If one works for or owns a small business, however, they probably don't know that everybody else is worse off, just that their business isn't doing so great. Since this is a thread about why a Republican return to power is difficult, I thought I'd add in one more complexity for the GOP.
“We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything. We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys. “It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that,” Jindal said. “It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.“...stop reducing everything to mindless slogans, tag lines, 30-second ads that all begin to sound the same.” Says the guy who was sent out to read goofy talking points and made to be a national laughing stock after Obama's first State of the Union.
^^^Look what happened in Delaware. After Christine O'Donnell's Senate campaign was crushingly defeated in 2010, the party fired the state chairman for being too moderate.
Isn't Jindal in the process of having creationism taught in LA public schools? He doesn't really have much credibility when it comes to not sounding stupid. Edit: Which is not to say that I'm unhappy that respected Reeps are piping up to refudiate the party's nuttier elements. I am, but to a certain extent, he's just painting over the wallpaper.
They're basically saying, "People will vote for us if we just get rid of the giant elephant shit we keep dropping." Also, another unsolicited advice article from WaPo, but it's worth reading because the Republicans don't seem to get #1. With all this talk about refreshing the party's approach, I'm willing to bet that the first primary debate will be a competition to see who hates government policies more.
I agree - I think we shouldn't forget that Romney was very poor and it's hard to beat an incumbent and it's really hard for any party to stay in power forever. These things are cyclical. But I also think Obama should work hard on immigration reform and other issues popular with young college kids because party loyalty can be a lasting influence on voters.
Great point. If unemployment were at 9%, few would be writing today about the unfavorable demographics that face the party of President Romney.
Well, there's that too - but this seems like a good time to really make the tea party think twice about blocking immigration reform.