Will to win
by digby
Huh.
A snapshot of the Republican Party, four months before the first primary ballots are cast, shows that voters are evenly divided between preferring a presidential nominee who can defeat Mr. Obama or one who aligns with them on most issues. A majority of voters who support the Tea Party movement place a higher priority on winning back the White House.
And here I thought the Tea Party people were non-partisan idealists who only cared about the issues. It turns out they just want to beat the Democrat. Go figure.
The NY Times poll is pretty interesting. People are very, very depressed about the economy, for obvious reasons. But I have to say that considering just how awful it is, Obama's not doing that badly. Still, Democrats are getting frustrated. They are, after all, the ones who believe that government is supposed to step in and help fix these sorts of problems and they aren't seeing any action. Not that they necessarily blame Obama alone for that, but they are nervous.
The Republicans are all over the place, but I'm quite sure they'll coalesce quite nicely now that it appears that the president may be vulnerable. They just want to win. The big question mark is the vaunted independents who aren't leaning one way or the other. But the truth is that most of them will vote for the party they usually vote for, regardless of what they call themselves. The very small slice of the electorate that are true swing voters are fairly likely to swing to the GOP, in my opinion, just because they are unhappy and figure they might as well give someone else a chance. Clearly they aren't ideological and don't care much about the discrete issues that do separate the parties and which often constitute the reason a voter identifies with one over the other. They just try politicians on until one feels comfortable.
One thing is clear. It's not going to be a blow out unless the Republicans nominate the Bachman/Gingrich ticket and it's not looking good for that. Both Perry and Romney are credible candidates. We'd better start paying attention to all those voting restrictions they've been feverishly passing all over the country since 2010 because it's going to be a close one.
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