>> I'd just like to understand exactly what we're talking about. Do people stop going to demonstrations? Why?
> Yes. That was exactly the finding of Michael Heaney:
>
> http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S110416
>
> This focuses on the antiwar movement. Once it stopped being Bush's war, and became Obama's - poof, no more antiwar movement.
I thought you were going to bring up that study. Sorry, but as I said before when it came up, it's a lame and shoddy argument wrapped around a good piece of research. Heaney found that demonstration turnout fell precipitously starting with the Obama campaign, lasting through the Obama presidency, and that it was precisely those who ID'd as Democrats who stopped going to the demos. He therefore concluded that correlation was causation and that Obama caused self-identifying Dems to stop turning out to demos. What is never mentioned in the paper (as far as I saw) is that simultaneous with the drop in demo turnout was (a) a precipitous drop in violence in Iraq, (b) a precipitous drop in media coverage of Iraq and (c) a precipitous drop in the salience of the Iraq issue in national polls. Once you allow for the possibility that demo turnout was falling in response to the Iraq war losing mass salience (rather than from the Obama Effect), it makes perfect sense that it would be the more mainstream Dem identifiers who would drop away and the more hard-core third-party types who would keep turning out.
That's why I noted that in the late 60's the antiwar movement grew by leaps and bounds even though the president was a liberal Democrat who was always trying to cover his left flank and portray himself as a peace-loving soul.
SA