The Other 50%

IF YOU WERE A CONSERVATIVE, WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE?

In the big picture, what is perhaps most amazing about Tuesday's election is that almost fifty percent, one in two, voted for a political party that has delivered almost an abject failure on every political metric (except maybe stacking the courts). From the do-nothing Congress to the Terry Shiavo spectacular; from torture to torture cover-up; from manipulation of Justice to refusing the sub-peona of The People's house; from massive debt for an unpaid-for nation-building exercise to a "socialist" drug program, the list is long, very long.

So, what would you have done if your political party had delivered such a disaster?

Would you have fallen in line, like a good soldier?

Even if they aren't "your party", just the 'political companions' of roughly similar ideological views, would you have voted "aye" for them?

I suspect I would have stayed home, on election day.

So, for me, the largest mystery of the election, is how we have a political belief system structured so that political parties are ... too big to fail, quite demonstrably.

Update: The figures are crunched.

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It happened, but not nearly as much as one might have suspected:

Just over 208 million voting-age American citizens were eligible to vote this year. Just over 187 million were registered to vote. Edison Media Research estimates that a total of just over 130 million actually voted for President, either in person or by mail. That's over 62 percent of all Americans eligible to vote. That's two points higher than four years ago. 2008 continues a steady trend of higher voter turnout since 1996. But it's not exactly a quantum leap.

The Center for the Study of the American Elecotrate Explains it this way."A downturn in the number and percentage of Republican voters going to the polls seemed to be the primary explanation for the lower-than-predicted turnout. . . . The long lines at the polls were mostly populated by Democrats."

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