Open Letter To Liberals And Progressives

[bvar22]

134. WEll, lets see WHO "stayed home".

There is a persistent and pervasive myth that Liberals stayed home in 2010 to punish President Obama,
but the facts do NOT support this myth.
It has been debunked many times at DU,
but this propaganda Talking Point blaming the Left is still being catapulted by either the uninformed,
or the willful spreaders of false information.

Did liberals really stay home and cause the 2010 rout?

You know what I'm talking about. The claim that a bunch of liberals were so pissed off at Obama that they stayed home and this caused the 2010 rout. It's pervasive. I won't link to examples because it comes up so regularly I see no point singling anyone out.

So I went back to the exit polls and the picture I see shows nothing like that. If you are a proponent of this claim, I challenge you for empirical proof that some set of activist liberals "took their ball and went home" or whatever metaphor you prefer to make Obama's leftward critics appear childish and immature. Inside, the evidence I found that shows this just ain't so.

<snip>

Still the claim that petulant liberals punished Obama to their own detriment is repeated so often with such certitude, I thought I would request to see the proof of it, because I don't see it, in the most obvious place it would appear if it were there, the proportion and voting of actual liberals in comparable elections.

If you have some more complex explanation of how it really happened, I would like to see it, because all I see is the proportion of the voting population calling themselves "conservatives" grew tremendously at expense of those calling themselves "moderates." [font size=3] Either a bunch of moderates became conservatives, or moderates stayed home, or a lot of conservatives who usually stay home came out. Or some combination of those things.[/font] Yet any of those explanations would be tremendously at odds with the "blame the progressives" explanation.


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/06/1003805/-Did-liberals-really-stay-home-and-cause-the-2010-rout#