Delaware Liberal

Friday Open Thread [10.25.13]

In 2015, according to the Back to the Future movies, we are supposed to have flying cars. Yet, in 2013, I don’t see any in our skies. That is about to change!!!

The thing looks a little rickety, and I thought flying cars worked on thrusters and hover technology rather than being actual planes with wingspans. But I will take what I can get.

Greg Sargent:

Polling released this week by the Washington Post and ABC News found the GOP’s unfavorability ratings among Americans at an all-time high of 63 percent.

But a closer look at the numbers reveals that this has been accompanied by a massive collapse in 2013 of the GOP brand among core constituencies important in midterm elections: Independents, women, and seniors. The crack Post polling team has produced a new chart demonstrating that in the last year — since just before the 2012 election – there’s been a truly astonishing spike in the GOP’s unfavorable ratings among these core groups.

The […] chart […] shows the GOP’s unfavorable ratings have jumped 19 points among seniors, to 65 percent; 17 points among independents, to 67 percent; and 10 points among women, to 63 percent. Those are all key constituencies in midterm elections.

[S]eniors tend to be a larger percentage of the vote in midterms than in presidential years, so any Dem inroads into traditional GOP dominance among them could matter. “Seniors tend to be very reliable voters in midterm elections,” Duffy says. “They turn out in great numbers. In the past few elections, they have favored Republicans. If Republicans start losing seniors in large numbers, they have a very big problem.”

Is it possible the 2014 elections will really be about the GOP brand, given that Democrats control the White House? This turns on a nuance of recent electoral history. In 2010, Dems tried to make the elections about the dangers of a return to Republican rule, arguing, famously, that voters should not give the keys back to the guys who drove the car into the ditch. That didn’t work, because voters didn’t see 2010 Republicans through the prism of the Bush years. Obama had been in charge for two years and had failed to turn around the economy, which remained in horrific shape. Voters in 2010 didn’t know what post-Bush GOP-rule meant.

But now, Democrats believe, voters do know what post-Bush GOP rule means — they have grasped the governing implications of a GOP that has been radicalized by the Obama presidency — and these core groups are recoiling. “The chances that the election could be about the GOP brand are over 50 percent,” Duffy tells me.

Yeah, the GOP is not racist at all:

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