Election Day, USA!

[amused]

I've seen the Republican base as being described as a three legged stool of defense-fiscal-social conservatives. If those are roughly evenly distributed, I can't see how they could eject a third of their base and replace it wholesale with anything else.

[Gerald McGrew]

That's a good point. Unlike the JBS issue before, the tea party faction of today's GOP is more substantial. Interestingly, polls of tea partiers have shown that they themselves are divided between Ron Paul libertarians and Sarah Palin Christian culture warriors.

So trying to encapsulate all this in simplistic terms misses the more nuanced reality.

IMO, they're more likely to marginalize the culture warriors. The trends on many of those issues simply are not with the religious conservatives, especially as the country becomes more secular. The libertarians however will likely find a common voice with the "small government" theme.

[Ian]

Yep.

[Warren Dew]

A candidate is not guaranteed to come out of a campaign looking as bad as Romney. McCain came through pretty good in 2008, for example; the only time I lost any real respect for him was when he slected Sarah Palin for veep, not from anything Obama might have said about him.

McCain was not running against an incumbent who could use his entire primary war chest against his general election opponent.

I don't watch TV, so no commercials swayed my opinion! Romney did that all on his own!

You got your opinions from the press and friends who watch or read the press. They got their opinions from the Obama campaign.

Yes, but the turnout for Democrats in 2008 was way up. So, the fact that it could be so far down for Obama in 2012 and Romney STILL couldn't motivate Republicans to get to the polls tells me that there were a lot of "who cares?" sentiment between Obama and Romney, or people were just not that enthused by Romney.

Negative campaigning pushed the numbers down on both sides. Think of it this way: negative campaigning pushed the numbers down by 10 million for each side, but the Republican enthusiasm made up for 8 million of that, resulting in a net of being down 2 million.

[Warren Dew]

Hillary Clinton. And she'll be defeated by Mitt Romney.

Hillary is retiring from politics, apparently. That was on one of the political news broadcasts yesterday... which surprised me.

Do you have a link? Is there any reason to believe this is a retirement she can't come out of?

[Warren Dew]

So, this is a concern for the GOP. In 2004, Bush was pretty popular. The economy was humming. It was one year after the invasion of Iraq, and things were looking pretty good there too.

You must live in an alternate reality from me. The hatred for Bush on the left was even stronger in 2004 than in 2008. In 2004, we were going nowhere in Iraq; in 2008, a local government had been established and we were withdrawing. Then there was the whole "usurper" thing with Florida, which dissipated only after Bush won a popular vote majority in 2004.

[Warren Dew]

I'm just guessing here because I really don't know their thought process, but I think it's possible that a lot of the Teavangelicals were so obsessed with purity that after rejecting Obama as a (supposed) Muslim they just couldn't vote for Romney as a Mormon. So they stayed home.

There were probably a few people who fell into that category. I doubt too many, especially since Mormonism wasn't discussed much during the campaign. but a few.

(Gripe: The whole "Obama is a muslim (or socialist, or Kenyan, etc.) thing is something which has really increased my cynicism over the last few years. These things were all said in 2008, but I wondered what those yahoos who actually believed that stuff would be saying in 2012, after fours years of an Obama presidency proved to them beyond any doubt that he was, in fact, not a muslim or a socialist or a Kenyan. But in 2012 they were still saying the same things! And the only explanation that comes to mind is that many of them really do live in an echo chamber of conservtative friends and media where they tell each other the same crap to the exclusion most of the outside world. And I have little doubt that we'll get to January 2017 with more than a few people still groaning about that muslim/socialist/Kenyan President we just survived. //End gripe.)

Of course, it worked to Obama's advantage in some quarters:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/2 ... 12400.html

[Ian]

So, this is a concern for the GOP. In 2004, Bush was pretty popular. The economy was humming. It was one year after the invasion of Iraq, and things were looking pretty good there too.

You must live in an alternate reality from me. The hatred for Bush on the left was even stronger in 2004 than in 2008. In 2004, we were going nowhere in Iraq; in 2008, a local government had been established and we were withdrawing. Then there was the whole "usurper" thing with Florida, which dissipated only after Bush won a popular vote majority in 2004.

I don't know about that. In 2004 the left mostly just despised Bush for Iraq; the Florida recount wasn't a major issue in 2004. His popularity during his 2nd term plummeted for various other reasons. Then again, he wasn't running in 2008.

My own memories on the subject was that I disrespected and wanted to replace by 2004. It wasn't until his 2nd term that I became convinced that he was one of the worst Presidents in US history.

[Tyrannical]

I don't know about that. In 2004 the left mostly just despised Bush for Iraq

Funny how Obama kept basically the same foreign policy as Bush, yet the left was mostly silent about that

[Warren Dew]

I've seen the Republican base as being described as a three legged stool of defense-fiscal-social conservatives. If those are roughly evenly distributed, I can't see how they could eject a third of their base and replace it wholesale with anything else.

I'm kind of hoping us Tea Party folks can replace the "social conservative" leg with "personal liberty" - including economic liberty.

[Warren Dew]

I don't know about that. In 2004 the left mostly just despised Bush for Iraq

Funny how Obama kept basically the same foreign policy as Bush, yet the left was mostly silent about that

I think a lot on the left think that sacrificing thousands in Afghanistan was okay, since we got Bin Laden not because of it.

[Jason]

Or many people realise the quagmire Iraq and Afghanistan have become and how a sudden withdrawal would great many more problems than the invasions were supposed to have solved.

[Jason]

Besides, it's convenient to have a large military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan - threaten Iran and all that.

[Gerald McGrew]

The strangest bit of data from the election I've seen so far...

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/ ... omney.html

Pew Research finds that Mitt Romney won 78% of the Mormon vote in the 2102 presidential election.

In 2004, George W. Bush was backed by 80% of Mormons.

[Warren Dew]

Or many people realise the quagmire Iraq and Afghanistan have become and how a sudden withdrawal would great many more problems than the invasions were supposed to have solved.

It wasn't just a sudden withdrawal - it was an escalation, which resulted in triple the troops and casualty rates in Afghanistan. The only way to justify that is the "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" mentality.