I PREDICT SUPPOSEDLY ORDINARY PEOPLE WILL SAY, "WE HATE ORDINARY PEOPLE!"

There's a lot of snickering on our side right now because Rand Paul seems to have put his foot in his mouth again while talking to ABC's George Stephanopoulos about the Gulf oil spill:

What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, you know, "I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP." I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.

What's more, as Betty Cracker notes, "Paul managed to imply that maybe the reaction to the recent mine explosion was a touch too anti-business as well." He said:

I mean, we had a mining accident that was very tragic and I've met a lot of these miners and their families. They're very brave people to do a dangerous job. But then we come in and it's always someone's fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen.

This should really, really hurt him, because, after all, he's a tea party candidate, and that means his supporters are self-reliant people with callused hands who really know the pain of something like a mine disaster.

Right?

Er, maybe not, according to the election results (hat tip: Politico's Jonathan Martin):

...Rand Paul won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate as an all out proponent of the Tea Party, the conservative, small government movement. The Tea Party, conventional wisdom says, is strong in largely white, rural areas.

Yet Rand Paul gathered his lowest vote totals in rural Kentucky....

... As you can see in the chart below, Paul won 63% of the vote in the cities, but only 54% of the vote in rural Kentucky.

Rand Paul got his largest percentages in exurban counties.



So Paul's base is people whose fingernails never get dirty. Because, after all, that's who the teabaggers are.

They don't care if the oceans get brutalized or a few miners die. They just want you to cut their damn taxes.