Conservative proof that this is a conservative nation.
As I noted
last week, those unskewers in the conservative movement are working overtime to dispel the mathematical certainty of their demographic predicament. This is particularly important as they try and push House Republicans into killing immigration reform.
So you get stuff like this:
No, the 2012 election didn’t prove the Republican Party needs a reboot
You'd think that losing by five in the national presidential popular vote (despite a lousy economy), losing the House popular vote, and losing Senate seats in a year where Democrats were almost entirely on defense would be a powerful signal that maybe things are amiss in conservative land. But nope! Never underestimate the right-wing power to bend reality to their whims. Let's head below the fold for the mental gymnastics.
It is hard to defeat an incumbent even in a slowly growing economy, and we could easily chalk up Romney’s loss to that fact.
So, Romney was always going to lose, even though they had all convinced themselves (even Romney!) of their impending victory. Hence, if you expect to lose, don't change anything! Just keep doing the things that made you expectedly lose.
Although over time both Romney and Obama were perceived as moving farther away from the average voter, Romney was still closer to this voter on Election Day. The candidate who would have benefited most from a shift to the center was Obama.
Republicans don't need to shift to the center. Democrats do! And the evidence is some YouGov chart that proved that Obama should've talked to the center. Instead, he didn't. And unfortunately for him (and lucky for Republicans!) Obama won.
If only he had shifted, all of this could've been avoided!
It is certainly true that Americans are moving left on some issues—most notably same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization. But Obama did not win the election because America is becoming more liberal, he won it despite the fact that America has become more conservative [...]
Far from ushering in a liberal majority, the Obama administration has presided over a shift among Americans toward preferring less government, not more government. Obama has helped to increase the overall conservatism of the American public more than Reagan ever did, ironically enough.
Go down every single issue—every one!—and Democrats lead Republicans. Yet this unskewer takes data from a
single model to claim that America has become "more conservative" because they want smaller government.
After Ronald Reagan's second term ... George H.W. Bush got elected. If Reagan made America "more liberal", America had a funny way of showing it. And if Obama made Americans more conservative, it only stands to reason that they'd reelect him again, right?
Fact is, the Democrats remain firmly in the American majority on every issue of note. So, if conservatives want to argue that some random chart proves that America is with them, they can knock themselves out. In the real world, things look a lot different.
The GOP will also benefit from what political scientist Alan Abramowitz calls the “time for a change” factor: only once since the 22nd Amendment limited the president to two consecutive terms has a party held the White House for more than two terms in a row.
Past performance is no indicator of future results. And that's doubly so in electoral politics, where the sample size is so small. I mean, the 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951, so we're talking a sample of just
16 presidential elections.
perhaps we’ll realize that all this talk of a “liberal majority” or “Obama’s mandate” or even a “Democratic realignment” was overblown. And perhaps we’ll even remember that the exact opposite argument was made in 2004, when evil genius Karl Rove was supposed to have ushered in a Republican realignment and Democrats would never win another election unless they could appeal to “values voters.” Those predictions of a Republican majority were soon proved false.
Those predictions were false because they weren't rooted in data, but ideology. The GOP didn't win in 2004 because of value voters, but because of warmongering. The "ideas" that people assumed drove the American public were bullshit—even then, big majorities of Americans believed in sensible gun restrictions, higher taxes for the rich and corporations, and protecting Social Security and Medicare. The only major social issue in which we were the minority was marriage equality, and even that's no longer the case.
Current discussions of the future electoral dominance of Democrats isn't based on ideology or perceptions of what the American people believe. Rather, they are based on the cold hard math of demographics. Our base groups are growing and becoming more Democratic. Theirs are dying off (even as they become more Republican). It's that simple.
So it's interesting to see that in an entire piece by a bunch of political scientists trying to convince us that 2012 didn't prove squat, there isn't a single mention of demographics. Not even in passing. That stunning omission is the written equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and screaming, "la la la I can't hear you!"
But hey, some random thing said America is more conservative and that Obama should've tacked to the center, so all's cool!