WE ARE A CERTAIN PERCENTAGE OF THE PEOPLE WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR

Steve Benen this morning:

We talked yesterday about the latest data showing Democrats actually faring pretty well with registered voters, but struggling with likely voters.

Rachel Maddow had a good segment on this last night.... "The country likes Democrats better," Rachel explained, "but the people who don't are the people planning to vote.

"The distance between Democrats winning versus Democrats losing on Tuesday is the distance between your tuchus on the couch if you're going to vote for Democrats and your tuchus actually making it to the voting booth on Tuesday if you're going to vote for Democrats. That's the distance...."

John Cole this morning, in response to a Politico story noting that a hated nuclear waste repository might open in Nevada if Sharron Angle beats Harry Reid and Reid takes his clout back to Searchlight with him:

I'm all in favor of rewarding Nevadans for their Sharron Angle votes. If we have to tolerate her toxic waste on the national scene, you get our radioactive waste in your back yard. Seems like a fair trade.

When Republicans sweep to power in the next 48 hours, this site is a no sympathy zone. Everyone of you jackasses who complained about how there was no difference between the two parties better find another website for your tears as the cold, cruel reality of wingnut rule becomes clear. There will be no sympathy here. Have fun, protest people. Now you really have something to protest about, and you don't have Rahm to kick around any more.

I agree with Steve and Rachel and John: you bloody well ought to get out there and vote Democratic, because Republicans are even crazier and more extreme than usual.

But, nationwide, we're not going to get trounced tomorrow because readers of Political Animal and Balloon Juice didn't vote, or because Rachel Maddow-watchers didn't vote. I don't even believe that's going to be the case in Nevada, where I predict Angle will win by at least a 5-point margin.

We're going to get trounced because the vast majority of people in the Democratic coalition are people who don't read political blogs all day and who watch CSI rather than Rachel Maddow. No one's given them a reason to feel hope, and no one's made a case they find persuasive for why they should remain patient -- not the administration, not the Democratic Party, and not us (our message doesn't even filter down to them indirectly, the way the right blogosphere's does to rank-and-file right-wingers, via Fox and talk radio). And we never laid the groundwork to make these people progressive Democrats, not just folks who happened to vote Democratic in 2006 and 2008. I think we just assumed they'd keep turning out, based on their demography and our expectation that they'd continue to loathe the GOP and admire Obama.

It doesn't work that way. The party and especially the White House needed to find a way to keep their hope alive over the past two bleak years; we needed to recognize the fact that they aren't us and therefore they don't instantly see what we see when we look at the right wing. They don't obsess over politics in general the way we do, so they don't grasp the very subtle arguments for why Obama's been at least a partial success.

I say this kind of thing all the time. I'm just saying it again because blaming people like ourselves for the enthusiasm gap is one more sign that we don't understand our own coalition, and thus one more reason we have such trouble preventing it from falling apart.