While Democrats have done their best to connect the GOP to Tea Party supporters and to paint Tea Party supporters as a fringe group of extremists, thereby implying the GOP is made up of extremists, the voters are not buying it.Obama, Pelosi and Reid have represented the extreme portion of their party base at the exclusion of Independents, centrists, moderates and conservatives and the midterm election results will reflect whether the country approves of that representation or not.
In the new The Hill poll recently released, not only did it find that 8 out of 10 open House seats were showing Republicans beating out Democrats but now they report that 44 percent of voters see extremists as being the dominant influence of the Democratic Party.
This result comes from The Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll, which found that 44 percent of likely voters say the Democratic Party is more dominated by its extreme elements, whereas 37 percent say it’s the Republican Party that is more dominated by extremists.
The revelations in a survey of 10 toss-up congressional districts across the country point to problems for Democrats, who are trying to motivate a disillusioned base and appeal to independents moving to the GOP ahead of the Nov. 2 election.
This result even crossed party lines with one-in-five Democrats, 22 percent, saying their own party was dominated by extremists, which is double the amount of Republicans that said the same thing about the GOP (11 percent).
Democratic leader such as Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Harry Reid are all far left liberal Democrats that have helped push the most liberally extreme agenda through the House and Senate in the last two years since Obama became president.
The voters have noticed and all the rhetoric to the contrary cannot change what the voters have watched unfold over the last couple of years.
“That’s real trouble for Democrats,” said Jim Kessler, co-founder of the Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank.
“All the press coverage has been about how these Tea Party candidates are fringe ideologues, and there have been high-profile examples of them proving the point,” he added. “Yet, still at this moment, you have independents saying, ‘I think the Democrats are a little more extreme than the Republicans.' "
Perhaps this is one reason we are seeing Blue Dog Democrats come out so hard against Pelosi, swearing to their constituents they will not vote for her as Speaker of the House if the Democrats should manage to retain control of the House of Representatives, going so far as to say they want a centrist as Speaker, calling her "divisive" and too "extreme".
If the GOP takes control of the House of Representatives, she will no longer be the Speaker and will not be able to set the agenda, push votes through on a strictly party line vote as she has done for the last years.
Harry Reid, another extreme Democrat, is up for reelection and the latest polling from Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, shows Angle up by two percentage points on Reid, 47 to 45 percent.
On October 8, 2010, Gallup found that the majority of likely voters are conservative and identify as or lean Republican, with 54 percent identifying themselves as politically conservative, 27 percent identifying as moderate and only 18 percent self identifying as liberal.
The Democratic Party leaders have allowed that 18 percent to push and prod them into passing legislation the majority of Americans opposed, basically following them right off a cliff because they consider them their "base."
Gallup's bottom line from that last linked report:
Gallup's first sketch of what the electorate may look like on Nov. 2 indicates that the enthusiasm gap favoring Republicans all year -- as well as the "thought" gap evident in a late August survey -- may well translate into highly disproportionate turnout among Republicans and conservatives on Election Day. That is a key reason Gallup's latest polling finds Republican candidates leading Democrats by 13- and 18-point margins, depending on turnout, in two estimates of the vote. Another is that political independents are aligning themselves with the Republican Party to a degree unprecedented in recent history.
In contrast to these extraordinary political patterns, the demographic composition of likely voters looks fairly normal relative to the profile of the electorate in 2006, as well as consistent with the trends seen since 1994 toward an older, more well-educated, and less substantially white, electorate.
At this point Obama seems to be in damage control mode, first giving that 18 percent of self identifying liberals something to hang their hat on after election night by blaming those nasty corporate outside groups (think Chamber of Commerce) for leveling the financial playing field against Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections, via advertising.
Secondly, insisting that should the GOP obtain control of the House they will "have to get along with him"
Democratic strategist Doug Schoen thinks Obama has given up on the 2010 elections as he states "It's pretty clear to me based on this interview that the president is saying, 'I've given up, You're on your own."
(Correction made to this post)
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