Democratic Party Losses: The Real Lesson
I am reading all over the Internet that Obama lost the independent voters in this election and similar statements about how this election was some kind of mandate and that people’s opinions of Obama have changed. There are so many such articles that I’m not even going to provide any links. Here’s the thing: this isn’t true. This election was all about who voted. More independents voted Republican in 2010 than in 2008. This is not because independents are more conservative than they were; it is because the more liberal independents didn’t vote. Every bit of polling I’ve seen has shown the same thing: everyone voted the same way in 2010 as they did in 2008. What changed was who voted. Of people under 30 years old, 13 million who voted in 2008 did not vote in 2010. This and this alone is the reason that the Republicans did well in this election. This is also why Republicans always want to discourage people from voting: if voting were mandatory, Democrats would win landslide after landslide.
The lesson of this election is that conservatives vote no matter what; liberals, not so much. And that’s it.
Keith Olbermann Dissects the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity
Watch it; you’ll be cheering!