2010 Election Projections.
Really Bad News For Socialists-
This could be a serious wave election. When Democrats took over Congress in 2006, unemployment was below 5%. It has doubled since then. When Barack Obama took over the White House, our nation was facing a serious recession. Now, we're in a deep recession. The economy is bad. The socialists now in power have enacted a controversial agenda, to say the least. And the past two elections have extended the Democrats, electorally-speaking, beyond their natural constituencies and into territory they had no business occupying.
Indiana!
Montana!
Democrats are vulnerable on many levels. Republicans still have to give voters a reason to rally behind them. We are getting there, but we need some kind of unifying, easy-to-understand message, some kind of positive Reaganesque idea, to be successful in 2010. It's happening, but we still have just under 7 months to a) screw things up and b) let the media right the ship on the Democrats' behalf. If the three factors hold any predictive weight, it could be an enormous year for Republicans in 2010:
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The data show that in elections where two of these factors are present, the party that controls the Presidency loses about 50 seats. But in this election, all three factors are present. To get an idea what this means, imagine what 1974 might have looked like if 1972 had produced a Congressional landslide to go with the Presidential landslide, and Republicans had entered the year with 232 seats instead of 192 seats. What if the economy had been in recession in 1966? What if Eisenhower had followed a more partisan agenda before 1958? What if Roosevelt had enjoyed his typical coattails in 1944, instead of receiving the fairly narrow 242 seat majority?
Those elections probably would have looked like 1938, 1894, or 1874. In those elections, the American people took their vengeance out on a party that was perceived as incompetent, and that was predisposed to fall due to the massive size of its majority. What we're seeing in the polls is a manifestation of something similar. While the power of incumbency has increased significantly since the 1950s, it's also true that both the Republicans and the Democrats are national parties now for the first time in our history. If Republicans can win in Massachusetts, they can win just about anywhere. And remember, Republicans don't need to win in Massachusetts for a landslide; they could pick up seventy seats without winning a single one in a Democratic-leaning district.
Add to this, Barack Obama is leading Ron Paul by only one percent in a new poll. Obama has vastly overstepped his mandate, which, admittedly, was the strongest mandate for "change" in several election cycles. Turns out Barack Obama was all the terrible things we said he was and none of the hopey dreamy things they said he was.
The damage from just two years of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid will be long-lasting, but America is not unrecoverable.
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