[WS:] Do you have any empirical evidence of this, as opposed to the alternative hypothesis: that voters wanted to "punish" the party in power by voting for a challenger? The latter only assumes that if things are going south, the electorate will vote against the party in power - which is "received wisdom" in policy analysis - the former requires an additional assumptions about political preferences of the electorate, which requires empirical proof. Can you cite any?
Wojtek
On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 10:37 PM, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't think any of my arguments necessitate an untapped reservoir of
> potentially left-leaning voters.
> If I was unclear, just about everything I've written is rooted in only
> thinking abotut who votes, who votes for D, for R, for a TP or not at all,
> and when... with only slight variations in the content of the population of
> voters.
> Obama's campaign energized a base and drew the middle/swing/independent
> voters in 2008. His Presidency has disappointed the base, middle, swing
> and
> independents who voted for him and has passively fostered bipartisan
> obstructionism, dissembling Repug pundits and media, and libertarian and/or
> racist Tea Partiers. This energizes the opposition and depresses
> proponents
> indpendent of what the 50-60% of eligible non-voters think.
> Who cares if Obama's done a lot of press conferences, the press conferences
> are uninteresting, they don't have a clear message and he doesn't come off
> as a man on a mission in them.
>
> On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 10:21 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > On Nov 5, 2010, at 10:16 PM, Somebody Somebody wrote:
> >
> > > Shane: How stupid can you get? The Dumbos were trashed be their 2008
> > voters by *not voting*.
> > >
> > > Somebody: Both you and Alan seem to subscribe to the view that there's
> a
> > vast reserve army of nonvoters silently waiting to be mobilized by a true
> > left-wing leader. I wish that this were true, but I prefer to stick to
> the
> > empirical data rather than to what's ideologically comfortable.
> >
> > This year's voters were whiter, righter, and older than the last crop,
> > there's no doubt about that. I agree about the untapped reservoir's
> > essential nonexistence though.
> >
> > Doug
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
>
>
> --
> *********************************************************
> Alan P. Rudy
> Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
> Central Michigan University
> 124 Anspach Hall
> Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
> 517-881-6319
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>