Jon Chait, at The New Republic, commenting on the violent political swings of the Midwest, which turned viciously on the GOP in 2006-08, then furiously on the Democrats in 2010, and where now GOP governors in Wisconsin and Ohio are unpopular:
The big picture is that the Republican Party was deeply discredited by the end of the Bush administration. Then you had Democrats running the government everywhere at the moment of the worst economic crisis in 70 years, so they managed to win power in a bunch of states. But this fact seems only to be reminding people why they hated Republicans in the first place.
Why doesn't he just say that the economy has constantly been bad, and that this has hurt whichever party has been in power? That would be a more straightforward reading of the evidence. Because that's not what Chait wants. He prefers to think that the GOP was "deeply discredited," whereas the Democrats were only shallowly discredited; and that now the GOP is deeply discrediting itself again. But what can it mean to "deeply discredit" if deep discrediting is forgotten in two years, just like the shallow kind? I'm not playing with words, Chait is; there's a reason he used the words he did.
It could also be that both parties overreached when in power; I think there's plenty of evidence that this is the case with the Democrats after 2008. Barack Obama wasn't as personally unpopular as his policies, or as Nancy Pelosi- the exact opposite of what you would expect if the economy were dragging down the Party in power. Similarly, Scott Walker's unpopularity in Wisconsin appears to be linked to his overreaching on labor policy more than any kind of violent surprise that the economy hasn't improved in two months. I don't know about Kasich in Ohio, but note that Mitch Daniels in Indiana won a legislative majority in 2010 despite being governor during bad economic times, so it might not only be economics that's driving swings.
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