Remember that stupid is the real name of the pubbie party for a reason, and you can't put anything past them, but as it is shaping up right now, it should be a tsunami, with debbie schultz killing herself on national TV.
I'm inclined to agree with you, USS Alaska and Lazlo in PA. Willard doesn't inspire the conservative base, but it will be the ABO vote from independents that carries the day, IMHO.
I'm not sure what Willard's political convictions are, or if he has any. If he has none, whatever he did in MA may mean mothing because MA was so far left, e.g. Ted Kennedy and John Kerry.
When Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's seat, independent registration was just over 50 percent of MA's voters. (In January 2010 they were called non-affiliated or unaffiliated voters in MA. Rats were just over 38 percent. The GOP were a little over 11 percent.) In a NPR story from September 23, 2010, "Pew surveyed 2,800 registered voters, 37 percent of whom were independents." "Only 34 percent were independent in 2008."
Independent voters can be a huge demographic depending on the state. Now I know that likely voters and swing states are more important in presidential elections, but it was moderate and independent voters that left the GOP in 2006 & 2008, but they came back in 2010. I posted the exit polls for those years. Look under the keyword 20XXexitpoll. Substitute 06, 08 and 10 for XX in 20XXexitpoll.
Hold you're nose again in 2012. I know it hurts, but ABO!
If we're still here in 2016, that's a different story.
Since absolutely everyone in this country is part of a class, employment category, or social group that in some way is primarily affiliated with one or the other of the two very large coalitions (which we call Republicans and Democrats) there are NO INDEPENDENTS.
LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and Bush all won one or more elections by respecting the bi-modal saddle structure and picking off a coalition partner from the other side.
It is first necessary for the candidate to preserve his BASE, and if he doesn't he can't possibly win. Here we have a situation where Romney has actually alienated his base, as has Obama.
There is no race to the top here ~ it's all downhill ~ the only question is how many millions ~ on both sides ~ will refuse to vote for the top dog.
Are you saying that the story that the Emanuel-Pelosi "demoralization" campaign emphasizing GOP officeholders' scandals and criminality, and the side effort by gays to out Mark Foley, did not depress conservative turnout in 2006?
That the turnout dynamic of 2004, with conservatives being brought to the polls in droves by Karl Rove's down-ballot DOMA referenda, was not inverted by the 'Rats in 2006 through the emphasis on GOP disgustingness? That's what I've been reading heretofore. Was it all wrong?
You do realize that this "it's all about the independents" is a RNC/RiNO/Willard Romney meme. One that the neocons have been pushing ever since they were horrified by the Southern conservatives (social conservatives) who carried the Congress in 1994, and immediately started a culture-war campaign against them within the GOP halls of power, arguing for the exclusion and quarantining of Southerners as leprosy-ridden moral outcasts who would soil, taint, and defeat the GOP if embraced.
That theme was meat and drink at The Weekly Standard for something like eight or ten years after 1994. One of their leading lights, Christopher Caldwell, was pushing it wherever he could, after writing a cover story in The Atlantic Monthly in 1996.