So he got 61 million new voters? Very interesting. Lots of people don't care enough to vote. This shocks you why, exactly? barfo
Reality has made Palin go off on a scripture spree. Reality? Try this: "Republicans have won the popular vote just ONCE in the last 23 yrs. They've lost it 5 out of the last 6 elections." Death. To. The. GOP.
It's not that people don't care, it's how many. I read the turnout could even be less than 2004, even though population has increased by over 20 million. Given the importance of this election, how divided the country seems to be, and our current economic climate, this does surprise me.
It may be a reflection of the political climate. To me, it's less that the candidates were horrible and more that the increasingly negative campaigning and vicious rhetoric from both sides is either convincing people that both candidates are terrible or else causing people to disengage because they don't want to wade into what has increasingly become a blood sport. After typing that, I actually looked up voting percentage of voting-age population per election year and it looks like the trend since 1960 is generally downward with three notable exceptions: 1992, 2004 and 2008. 1992 and 2008 could be described as "optimism cycles" of truly gifted campaigners (though that then begs the question of why 1980 didn't have the same effect)...2004, though, is hard to explain.
I've come to the conclusion that the negative ads are actually true. Both candidates are terrible. I'm thinking the really big story of this election is the decline in turnout for a race between a messianic figure and a guy who might actually pull our fat out of the fire.
The ads for the mayoral race here were about how one guy (the democrat who got elected) assaulted a woman and spent some time in jail (was arrested, pled no contest) and the other was accused of being a crook.
Interesting read on the Tea Party: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34291.html There’s no centralized tea party organization, and anecdotes suggest that many tea party participants hold socially conservative views. But those views have been little in evidence at movement gatherings or in public statements, and are sometimes deliberately excluded from the political agenda. The groups coordinating them eschew social issues, and a new Contract From America, has become an article of concern on the social right. The contract, sponsored by the grass-roots Tea Party Patriots as well as Washington groups such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Tax Reform, asks supporters to choose the 10 most important issues from a menu of 21 choices that makes no mention of socially conservative priorities such as gay marriage and abortion. ... There’s little data on the disparate tea party movement. One small CNN survey of self-identified tea party activists found that 68 percent identify themselves as Protestants or other non-Catholic Christians, as opposed to just 50 percent in the general population. Only 9 percent of the activists say they’re irreligious, as opposed to 14 percent in the broader sample. But an in-depth study of 49 tea party leaders by the free-market oriented Sam Adams Alliance suggested that the leadership consciously avoids social issues and plans to continue doing so. “None of them chose social issues as the sole direction for the movement,” said the group’s marketing director, Anne Sorock, who oversaw the study. She said that while many of the leaders held conservative views on social issues, “they were completely adamant that [the issues] were not a part of their agenda for the long term.” “Across the board everyone had the same answer: It’s so important that they achieve their goals that social issues cannot distract them, because they need to cast the widest net of consensus with the widest group possible,” she said. The rise of the fiscal and economic conservative grass-roots has been cause for celebration in the socially liberal wing of the Republican Party. http://www.thecontract.org/support/
