And that last threat comes not only from the crazed House GOP, but from Sen. Marco Rubio, to make up for his apostasy on the issue of immigration reform. This is not only the nullification party, but the unhinged-from-reality party, and voters are recoiling at identifying themselves with it, understandably.
But while it’s comforting to look at those numbers as a fed-up nation rejecting the intransigent GOP, it’s scary to look at the polling on which party voters think ought to control Congress.
In the latest NBC/Wall St. Journal poll there’s a 44-44 tie – but that breaks down to favor Democrats in blue districts and Republicans in red ones. Republican gerrymandering – a practice also indulged by Democrats but never as brazenly as by the GOP since 2010 – means that it will be hard for Democrats to take back the House.
Another scary number is the percent of people who think Congress has been too inflexible in dealing with the president: While that number ticked up a point since January 2011, the share of those who think Republicans have compromised too much with Obama more than doubled, moving from 8 to 18 percent.
So Republicans’ numbers are declining, but the ones who are left are even crazier.
The president’s Knox College speech may be best understood as an effort to prepare the public for another debt-ceiling hostage crisis engineered by the GOP, against a backdrop of polling that shows that even as voters run from the Republican Party, too many blame Obama and the Democrats at least partially for gridlock. I certainly hope it works. The effect of Republican nullification is to turn off voters and, in particular, to discourage the Obama coalition from turning out in 2014. I’m happy to see Obama back in campaign mode, because Democrats can’t afford a rerun of 2010.
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