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The binary view of voter alternatives miss the largest single option: not voting at all. Most of the time, voters don't just switch but drop out of the process until something lures them back. There was a study done at one point comparing the 1964 LBJ landslide to the 1980 and 1984 Reagan victories. What they found was that the demographics remained quite consistent. If you were a blue-eyed Presbyterian living in a community of 10,000 to 20,000 with an income of such-and-such, you tended to vote the same way in either election. The difference was that in 1964, those constitutencies tending to vote Democratic were well motivated and well organized...and participated in the election disproportionately. By 1980, a chain of Democratic betrayals left them demoralized and relatively disiniterested in turning our to save the Carter administraiton. In contrast,conservative voters scared that blacks were going to mug them, unions were going to overcharge them for labor, and Iranians or Russians or foreigners of some sort or another were going to steal their sheep were well motivated and well organized. The most likely thing right now isn't that the voters who elected Obama are going to vote Republican but that they're not going to turn out to reelect him...or, most immediately, to reelect Democrats to Congress in 2010. The man decided to model his administration after Clinton and used a lot of the same people. And Clinton's failure to do the pathetically few things he said he'd do in 1992 resulted in his losing his base in 1994. . ML ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
