Six percent.
The vote difference between Jackass and John McCain was 6% in the general election. It is similar to the margin of victory between Bush and Kerry in 2004. Jackass outspent McCain 10 to 1 and the Democrats had a sizable war chest thanks to Howard Dean’s mercenary tactics. This was no landslide.
Today’s talking point is that the Republican party has an all-time low membership and is in worse shape than the Democrats. The reality is that the Republicans only lack a coherent message. Independents are turning, well, independent. That constituency doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Newt Gingrich needed less than a year to develop a message that led to Republican victories.The party lost by ignoring those principles, not by embracing them.
The administration has been calling the Republicans the party of no. I would say they are the party of no more. They want to stop the out of control spending with no understandable plan. There was an anti-government sentiment that led to the elections of 2008. It is even stronger now and there are no Republicans in charge.
