"The Government-Shrinkage Folks"
Yay! That's us! From self-identified "numbers nerd" Chris Cillizza's WaPo article:
54. A majority of Americans who went to the polls Nov. 4 believe that the “government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals,” while just 41 percent think “the government should do more to solve problems.” Those numbers suggest that the long-running battle over what government can and should do (and how much it should do) is tilting back toward the smaller-is-better crowd that dominated in the mid- and late 1990s. The early years of Obama’s presidency were defined by a belief that government might need to do more than it had during the latter days of the George W. Bush administration. (Think Hurricane Katrina.) But the pendulum is in the process of swinging back to the government-shrinkage folks.
Some of the other numbers on which Cillizza reports are somewhat interesting. Like the 4% edge the dems have among women actually being higher than the 1% edge in the 2010 mid-terms. Maybe the war on women drumbeat brought out some more liberal women than in 2010? I really hope the dems keep up the war on women mantra. Among most on the right and center it just sounds so stupid, yet it epitomizes the way they think.
Also the 36% of Hispanics is a slightly interesting number to me. But not terribly. I think the term "Hispanic" or "Latino" is simply too amorphous a group to make much of. The vote of Cuban-Americans has been closer to 50% than that of Puerto Rican-Americans which the dems have a solid lock on.
I don't agree that there's a "tilt" or "shift" away from expanding government involvement.
ReplyDeletePlenty of folks who oppose expansion of the welfare state aren't opposed to the War on Drugs or Immigration Enforcement. Lots of those people turned out for the mid-term elections.
If similar ratios are produced in analyzing the presidential election in 2 years, there might be something. If such ratios are still with us following the mid-term and presidential elections in the following years, then we might have a trend.
But, for now, I think it just shows that the people who support the kind of gov't intrusion Obama advocates and represents didn't turn out for the relatively boring mid-terms. They may or may not show up in two years without Obama on the ticket.