From The Ditch

Incoming House Speaker John Boehner tells ABC's Diane Sawyer that Red Barry is "in denial about what the election means":

As has become a recurring theme both pre- and post-Tuesday, it isn't that The One "doesn't get it" about why the Death Wave carried away sixty-four (at last count) House seats and a half-dozen Senate seats; it's that he doesn't WANT the true reason, because to accept the truth would be to commit ideological suicide:

Here we reach the nub of the matter: The ideological composition of the electorate shifted dramatically. In 2006, those who voted were 32% conservative, 47%, and 20% liberal. In 2010, by contrast, conservatives had risen to 41% of the total and moderates declined to 39%, while liberals remained constant at 20%. And because, in today’s polarized politics, liberals vote almost exclusively for Democrats and conservatives for Republicans, the ideological shift matters a lot.

To complete the argument, there’s one more step: Did independents shift toward Republicans because they had become significantly more conservative between 2006 and 2010? Fortunately we don’t have to speculate about this. According to the Pew Research Center, conservatives as a share of total Independents rose from 29% in 2006 to 36% in 2010. Gallup finds exactly the same thing: The conservative share rose from 28% to 36% while moderates declined from 46% to 41%.

This shift is part of a broader trend: Over the past two decades, moderates have trended down as share of the total electorate while conservatives have gone up.

Ah, but how much of that is a true ideological shift versus simply a short-term reaction to Lucifer's imperious overreaching?  The long-running joke is that a moderate is a liberal who doesn't want to remove his liberalism from the closet; given the ill-repute into which conservatism was brought by the profligacy into which the last GOP majorities fell, and the War on Terror passing the historical public support expiration date of all American overseas conflicts, it may simply have been that the ranks of "moderates" swelled due to President Bush's media-fueled unpopularity.  Whereas the large exodus from "moderate" to "conservative" is simply the same process in reverse in reaction to the plummeting popularity of his Donk successor.  I can easily see The One rationalizing himself out of this unpleasant dilemma: "All we have to do is wait for the Republicans to start trying to pass all that Teabagger crap and we'll demonize the holy hell out of them a la MediScare, and the swingers will come flocking back to us."

But THIS nuance is substantially less rationalizable:

It didn’t matter whether the challenger had experience, or if he raised a lot of money. Neither of those variables is statistically significant.

This doesn’t mean that this election was all about the economy. Far from it. As Jon Chait pointed out, a statistical model based only on economic/structural facts suggested that Democrats should lose only about forty-five seats. This is only one model and it suggested the worst-case scenario for Democrats; other “structural” models put the number in the twenties and thirties. In other words, the Democrats’ losses were about twenty to forty seats in excess of what we would expect from the effects of the economy and back-to-back wave elections. Remember, Reagan’s Republicans encountered similar economic headwinds in 1982, and they lost twenty-six seats, a baker’s dozen of which can be directly chalked up to the intervening redistricting.

Rather, it suggests that voters in swing- and Republican-leaning districts decided that they disliked the Democrats so much that it didn’t matter whether a candidate supported the President’s health care bill or the stimulus. They voted against them anyway.

Or, in short, and in the heights of orgasmic irony, the 2010 election was really all about Barack Obama.  Which makes early warning signals like this disproportionately ominous:

Obama’s own job approval ratings continue to lag. The poll found that 45% of Americans approved of the way Obama is doing his job, versus 51% who said they disapprove.

In a sign that Obama has some work to do to improve his fortunes ahead of his 2012 re-election campaign, 52% of those surveyed did not think Obama will win re-election in 2012, the poll found. This included 34% of Democrats and 75% of Republicans....

Sixty-two percent believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.  That is always an ambiguous measure, but with one party in power the last two years, it’s a lot less ambiguous than usual.

Likely voters (in this cycle, not 2012′s) say by almost 2-1 that Obama has made the economy worse, 50/26.  That’s actually a better question for pollsters to ask than whether Obama or George Bush should get the blame; two years into his presidency, the issue now is Obama’s performance, not Bush’s.

A majority say Obama has made the deficit worse, 53/14.

Sure, this poll means nothing in and of itself.  What it does indicate is the political terrain upon which False Messiah's re-election effort will be waged.  And this unfavorable PR terrain is matched by the Electoral College terrain that saw Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin - all Obama-carried states two years ago - flip "red" in 2010.  That's 121 Electoral College votes, or a third of The One's 2008 haul, without which it is mathematically impossible for him to capture a second term.

Does this mean King Hussein has no choice but to triangulate?  Not at all, says Mark Helperin; he just has to be a kinder, gentler Marxist-Alinskyist asshole:

Exit question: We all know "independent" voters' stubbornly irrational fetish for "comity" and "getting along" and "putting aside differences to do what's best for the country".  Could it be that the Death Wave was less about vehemently unwanted Donk "accomplishments" and more about the obnoxious way they were rammed down our throats?  If Godbama starts offering up Slurpee Summits in which he humbly pledges to work with the GOP on passing the rest of his leftwingnut extremist agenda, and Boehner and McConnell reply by effectively telling him to "shove it," isn't there a measurable chance that that would be enough to swing indies back to his side at least enough to secure his own personal re-election, if not return his party to majority power?