Election 2009: Virginia, New Jersey Exit Polls - From Obama to the Economy - ABC News
Vast economic discontent marked the mood of Tuesday’s off-year voters, portending potential trouble for incumbents generally and Democrats in particular in 2010. Still the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey looked less like a referendum on Barack Obama…
And…
Voters who expressed the highest levels of economic discontent heavily favored the Republican candidates in both states – underscoring the challenge Obama and his party may face in 2010 if economic attitudes don’t improve. The analogy is to 1994, when nearly six in 10 voters said the economy was in bad shape, and they favored the out-of-power Republicans by 26 points, helping the GOP to a 52-seat gain and control of Congress for the first time in 42 years.In Virginia on Tuesday, voters who were “very” worried about the economy concern supported the Republican winner, Bob McDonnell by a wide margin, 73-26 percent. In New Jersey, while the gap wasn’t quite so broad, voters who were most worried about the economy backed Republican Chris Christie by 59-36 percent.
You can only believe these results have nothing to do with Obama if you manage to force yourself to believe that Americans think he has nothing to do with the economy. By this time next year, it will be quite obvious this is untrue.
But I hope they keep right on telling themselves that, until its finally too late for them to recover.
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
Oh, I think there are going to be lots and lots of voters out there who understand full well from whence cometh the current economic anschluss.
Some among them may hold that W helped bring us up to the tipping-point over the past few years, until the election last Fall - but I think far more than enough of them can see quite clearly that The Obamanation & Co. took it way, way past the tip-over and down the rabbit hole.
The Won and his Demonrat-”dominated” Legislative Branch own the whole thing, now, rotten body and warped soul - although they’ll keep on trying to deny it, of course, right up to the point when they find themselves out on the sidewalk, trying to peddle apples and pencils.
I hope they don’t catch on too soon as well.
When by Obama’s own admission there will be trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, people start waking up and asking “who is actually going to pay for that?”. Then they look in the mirror and get their answer.
Obama thinks he can snow people into believing their grandchildren will pay. Joe Six Pack understands all too well that when the loan sharks get worried that their “client” is going to skip town, they “accelerate” the payment schedule.
The ongoing economic collapse has almost nothing to do with Obama. Economically, he has done nothing but continue Bush’s hopeless policies. This is one of the sites that predicted the housing-led collapse years ago, long before Obama came onto the national scene. We should know better than to fall into the major parties’ trap of seeing the failure’s of one party as an argument in favor of the other; both parties have been failing for years.
If the Republicans think they can run as ‘not-Obama’ and continue their failed policies of the last decade, they will lose. Hopefully, the message from yesterday will be that the fiscally conservative base will not accept anymore Bush’s, or McCain’s, or RINO’s or DIABLO’s.
Speaking of “blind, deaf and dumb” - with emphasis on the “blind” part…
This is near-moronic (i.e., not quite that smart) in its insistence upon ignoring events since the Coronation Of The Won. While Bush and the Republican Party have admittedly done almost nothing to stem the rising tide of economic instability - and, in Bush’s case, done a fair amount that aggravated matters - the tip-over into full-blown Gubmint economic insanity and disaster, as well as most of the driving factors behind this plunge into Ponzi-scheme collapse and burnout, has its authorship in the Demonrats and their Affirmative Action con-man Chief Executive.
The Obamanation and his Demonrat cohort Congresscritters own the monumental mess they’ve made of our economy. No one should be allowed to forget that - and any attempt to dismiss any part of it as “…continu
e(ing) Bush’s hopeless policies.” is Just.Plain.Stupid.True enough - and the only intelligent part of your comment, MattJ.
Job One is now to convince them of that - and to keep hammering away at them until the Pubbies understand, full well: If they want to win, small government/fiscal conservative candidates are the only way to go. Using the atrociously irresponsible economic insanity of the Obamaniac Administration thus becomes a powerful weapon with which to attack, in 2010 and beyond.
Obama owns this recession - virtually everything he’s done has deepened and broadened and lengthened it. Republicans can use that, if they’ll pull their heads out of their “moderate, bipartisan, the-lesser-of-two-weevils” mode, and get with the genuine conservative theme.
Silly-assed moaning about “it’s mostly (or all) Bush’s/the Republicans’ fault, really” isn’t true, and does nothing to help the situation.
I’m sorry J.S., but to believe that you’d have to believe the economy was perfectly healthy until 2007 when the Democrats took over the House. The housing bubble, and the debt bubble in general, was well underway and had been for years before then. Republicans were just as willing as Democrats to push for increased home ownership by any means necessary, to push higher and higher debt loads on everyone, and to increase federal, state, and local spending far beyond tax revenue.
Obama hasn’t even passed a budget yet; he voted for the economic mess we are in while in the Senate, but so did most Republicans, as well as Bush. There are more fiscally sane Republicans in the House and Senate than Democrats, but that is a very low bar.
I have to concur with Matt here on the facts, but not the conclusion.
Bush was a RINO and economically had been following a left of center economic course (he had huge budget deficits and had added greatly to entitlement liabilities). He had no problems with the Fed’s abnormally low rates or 18 month creeping rise in those rates, which were a key factor in blowing up multiple market bubbles.
Obama, however, owns this mess now. He has taken all these bad policies to the Nth degree. He’s more than tripled a huge budget deficit. He wants to nationalize health care. His administration owns 7 major financial and industrial companies. He is directly managing those companies by setting pay levels and other policies. Barney Fwank wants to control the whole financial system. Think Obama has a problem with that? Probably only in the fact that it should be him and not Fwank that controls it. He has abrogated contracts that said that lenders to GM and Chrysler who were either senior or parri passu (fancy for equal) should get more than his favored group in bankruptcy, and taken that money and given it to said favored group instead. That’s outright stealing.
He wants to ban a news channel because they criticize his administration.
He not only bought Bush’s cow, he has taken the whole farm and now he’s trying to collectivize it.
Obama is going to take a bad situation and make it worse.
And anyone who believes “because Bush did it first” qualifies as an excuse around here should spend some time reading the archives.
Kenny- there is nothing you wrote I’d disagree with.
Old Grouch - I’ve been reading this site for years, commenting infrequently. As I wrote above - “This is one of the sites that predicted the housing-led collapse years ago, long before Obama came onto the national scene.” In no way was I implying that expanding what Bush did was a good thing.
My point is that there are plenty of Republicans who own this recession/depression just as much as Obama and most Democrats do. Plenty of Republicans voted for TARP against massive popular opposition. Plenty of Republicans supported things that led to the housing bubble, and supported free market capitalism right until their patrons faced creative destruction. Republicans will need to do more than nominate the same old RINOs and DIABLOs and blame Obama.
Matt’s got it.
This is where we get to from lots of GOP reps elected because “they weren’t quite as bad as Dems,” followed by a Dem landslide caused by disgust on the part of the conservative base directed at a heaping helping of GOP crap sandwiches.
Another way of saying, “Not as bad as Dems” is, “Not good enough for me, sorry.”
Judson is busy chortling because I blew my prediction about Doug Hoffman. He’s not, um, perspicacious enough to understand that first we clean our own house: Then we burn his house down.
Hoffman was a great first step in that housecleaning. I really wanted to defeat the Dem, but that was just icing on the cake. Running Scozzafava out of the race and the party was the real deal meal.
With which I concur, and which was, if you will carefully examine it, the precise basis for my entire point.
True enough - however, really not the point.
Also true enough - but still only part of the point (and the lesser part, at that) to be made.
Spot on - and the “weapon” I was alluding to.
Concentrate on reminding the Republican “machine” - every step of the way, every chance you get, that the way to attack - and defeat - The Obamanation and all their lesser minions is to use that weapon. Make reference, if you must, to prior errors on the part of the GOP, in making plain that assisting in the election - or re-election - of RINO/DIABLO shit sandwiches is no longer in the program. However, maximize the use of “The Won owns this bloody mess!” as the line of assault.
Making statements about how the “…ongoing economic collapse has almost nothing to do with Obama.” are not only wrong, they’re counter-productive. This horrid econo-swamp is now all about Obama - it’s All Obama, All The Time - it’s everything that went before this year, yes, but doubled and re-doubled and re-re-doubled, in trumps. Mr. Hopey-Changey wanted the job, and he got it - and promptly dove off an economic cliff with it. Beat him and his adherents like a big, bad drum with that, just as hard as you can.
I wouldn’t bet on it. As Dan suggested, election-day caboodling seem a more likely cause than pre-election cupidity. As they say, it doesn’t matter who casts the ballots; what matters is who counts them.
ACORN and SEIU?
J.S., all I can say is that that line of attack would do nothing to get me to vote for a Republican. You don’t need to convince me that the likely Democratic candidates aren’t worth supporting; you need to convince me that the Republican candidate IS worth supporting. I’m sick to death of voting for Republicans that act as badly as Democrats.
I’m more with MattJ here, JB. The most effective line of attack will not be “Obama is a steaming pile of crap.” It will be, “Vote Republican, because that is a vote for a less expensive, less intrusive, less controlling government.”
Make me do more than want to vote against Dems. Make me want to vote for Republicans. That has been the absolute core of my protest since 2004, and my strategy from that time onward.
I agree, wholeheartedly, with that point of view - I simply think, at this point, greater emphasis needs to be on making Obama carry the biggest brunt of the political head-beating over the current state of economic disaster.
The remaining adherents to the GOP who can still think for themselves, I think, already understand (although they still don’t like to admit it) that their Party has been complicit in creating the run-up to the disaster. The “Party faithful” who continue to deny that, or act as though it doesn’t matter, are making themselves irrelevant as time goes on. Personally, I’m well past the point of needing to keep on pointing any of this out to any of them.
If they haven’t gotten the message by now, I doubt they’re ever going to. Point made - time to move to the next phase.
YMMV.