Chris Hayes -- host of MSNBC's All In -- assured voters Thursday that never again will they endure a government shutdown if they perform one simple task- end the house GOP majority. Never mind that 17 shutdowns have occurred since 1976 under both Democratic and Republican house majorities, but given the media's reporting in recent weeks, don't expect voters to think that. Good news for Hayes and the Democratic party though, apparently the votes to usurp the Republican majority have been there all along, in fact, Republicans don't even represent most of America:
The nature of the electorate, as much as the will of the people, is what decides elections. In an off year, and especially in a special election, there is lower a voter turn-out, and an older voter population that tends to favor Republicans. For Democrats, the big challenge going forward is to leverage the near-catastrophe engineered by the GOP to convince their voters to come out in 2014...The story of how we got to the brink of economic catastrophe is not just a story about Ted Cruz and a bunch of GOP extremists. It's much bigger than that. It's a story about how we elect our leaders in America. There are two fundamentally different electorates that shape American politics. There's the one that comes out to elect a president and there's the one that votes when the President is not on the ballot.
First, Hayes relays 2010 archive footage of House Speaker John Boehner stating the Republicans victory reflected America's desire to end the "Obama/Pelosi agenda", then goes on to explain why those who voted for President Obama in 2012 represent American demography better than those who voted Republican in the 2010 mid-terms. Preview: Fox News viewers don't watch the Super Bowl!
Boehner's claim that America wanted the 'President to change course' only made sense if you pretend that the 41% of people who cast ballots are a good representation of America, and they aren't...In the 2010 shellacking, the electorate had fewer African-Americans, fewer Latinos, and more whites. It looked, well, less like America. In short, the 2012 electorate looked kind of like the audience that watches the Super Bowl, while the 2010 electorate looked more like the audience that watches Fox News.
While Obama did win the 2012 election, Hayes failed to mention his narrow victory by only 5 million, making him one of the only Presidents in history to have lost electoral votes for re-election. It's also noteworthy that Republicans maintained their House Majority in the 2012 election despite the heavy turn-out of Chris Hayes' winning demographics.
