If you want to understand why the Republicans won a wave election this year, consider what respondents said in this Pew survey:
A majority of Americans would like to see Barack Obama and Republican leaders work together over the coming year. But Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to favor a confrontational approach toward the political opposition, even if that results in less getting done.
Overall, 57% of the public says Republican leaders in Washington should try as best they can to work with Barack Obama to accomplish things, even if it means disappointing some groups of Republican supporters, while 40% say they should "stand up" to Obama on issues that are important to Republican supporters, even if it means less gets done in Washington. And by about a two-to-one margin (62% to 30%) more say Obama should work with Republicans than say he should stand up to the GOP....
Within the Republican Party, only about a third of Republicans and Republican leaners (32%) want to see the GOP leadership work with Obama if it disappoints some groups of Republican supporters. About twice as many (66%) say GOP leaders should stand up to Obama even if less gets done....
If this is how voters are thinking, it's no wonder that this was a Republican wave election. Republican voters overwhelmingly favor Republican candidates pushing Republican policies. Democratic and swing voters overwhelmingly prefer something midway between the Democratic agenda and the Republican agenda, jut because compromise seems the only way out of our current impasse. So of course a significant percentage of non-Republican voters are going to vote Republican -- they think that's the way you get compromise when you have a Democratic president, and they're desperate for compromise because they think there's no other way to get anything done.
It's a complete misunderstanding of Republican officeholders' willingness to compromise, but since the mainstream press refuses to report accurately on Republican intransigence, and Democratic politicians won't describe GOP intransigence as Washington's real problem, you can't blame the public for being misinformed. And so here we are.
