The GOP’s self-examination on the 2012 election debacle rightly identifies marketing and messaging and lack of a ground game as contributors to that mess. But the GOP’s self-exam missed a potentially fatal problem for the party: the American people simply do not trust Republicans on the budget. Read this paragraph from The Hill carefully. Read all of it. It should tell you everything you need to know. More voters trust the Democratic Party than
For 20 years, the Battleground Poll of States (now the Politico/GW Battleground Poll) showed a freakish consistency about ideology. 2009: 59% Conservative 2012: 57% Conservative With almost 60% calling themselves somewhat or very conservative, how could Barack Obama get re-elected? How could Republicans fail to gain the Senate in 2010 and 2012? Come to think of it, how do Democrats win at all? The answer is simple: being conservative doesn’t make you Republican, but
I agree with Republican Senator Corker that inflation is a danger in the future. But inflation doesn’t win the hearts and minds of most Americans right now. No one’s worried about it except economists and economics geeks. The death of the community and regional bank, however, does bother people. As does the printing of money that goes straight into the 5 biggest banks in history . . . and stays there. The US Government bailed
Marco Rubio gave the Republican response to the State of the Union address for two reasons. First, Rubio’s Cuban, and the GOP wants to court Latinos. Second, Rubio’s relatively young, and the GOP wants to stop the bleeding when it comes to young voters. But there’s a fundamental problem with the Republican approach, and it stems from the GOP’s least favorite discipline: behavioral science. Young People Are Naturally Skeptical You hear about scams that target
Welcome Dr. Gina Show Listeners! Republicans should announce “the sequester won’t be so bad” and shut up, and science tells us why. Obama, the Dems, liberal pundits, the press, and even John Boehner are running around yelling about how horrible the sequester will be. In some deep recesses of our minds, we agree. “Oh, my God! We’re all going to do die!” Fear-mongering only works in the future because, in short, nothing is as bad (or as
The 3 million McCain voter who didn’t vote for Romney didn’t stay and they didn’t vote third party. They died. To survive, the GOP needs to stop being afraid of Millennials and tell them truth: they can move out of mom and dad’s house, they can drop out of school, they can quit their dead-end job with the idiot supervisor. But they can’t get away from government and debt.
Consider these numbers: 9.8 million 11.6 million 16.8 million 55% 61% Between the 2008 and 2012 elections: 9.8 million people died*, 55% of them were reliable Republican voters 16.8 11.6 million people reached voting age–61% of them are semi-reliable Democrat voters Between those years, neither the GOP nor conservative leaning organizations did anything significant to deal with this demographic cliff. We know the cost. What was Obama’s popular vote margin? About the same as the difference between
Part 3 of 3 | Read Part 1 | Read Part 2 Before we get too far down the Akin rally road, let’s get some solid advice to Mr. Akin. His principles, his spine, his grassroots do no good if Missouri turns blue. He cannot advance his causes from his house in Wildwood. Failure to take the Senate makes Obamacare permanent, at least in our lives. Todd Akin, wonderful man he is, has a lot
Analogies say more about the speaker than about the subject. Candy Crowley told KMOX Radio listeners on Friday that Tea Party groups resemble the Balkans without guns. Wrong. Crappy analogy, Candy. The diverse and autonomous, often quarrelsome, Tea Party groups remind me of the original 13 colonies. The colonies were divided on just about every subject imaginable. The disagreed on slavery, on economics, on agraculture, manufacturing, cities, names — name it. But they agreed one
I blogged about the battle of the Tea Party’s future going on around the Lake of the Ozarks recently. I received this response from Freida Keough, St. Louis County Director of Missouri Precinct Project: My answer: We have 56 positions for committeemen and women in 28 Townships for St.Louis County. Did you know that 35 new individuals filed for these positions in addition to the incumbents. Coincidence? I don’t think this happened because people felt