Turnout Motivators

Our job right now is not persuading or swaying any non-Democratic voters; there aren't any real independents and the repugs will never vote for Democratic candidates.

 

The job right now is increasing Democratic turnout. Getting non-voting Democratic voters off their asses and to the polls. Motivating Obama supporters to vote.

 

David Atkins explains why repugs are going all out for the white vote, writing off minorities and cutting their own demographic throat for the future: because they only need to do it one more time to create a permanent Lords and Serfs society.

In a must-read piece in New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait explains the full ramifications of this dynamic:

“Multiple senior Romney advisers assured me that they had had conversations with the candidate in which he conveyed a depth of conviction about the need to try to enact something like Ryan’s controversial budget and entitlement reforms,” reports the Huffington Post’s Jonathan Ward. “Romney, they said, was willing to count the cost politically in order to achieve it.” David Leonhardt floats a similar sketch, plausibly outlining how Romney could transform the shape of American government by using a Senate procedure that circumvents the filibuster to quickly lock in large regressive tax cuts and repeal of health insurance subsidies to tens of millions of Americans.

 

Blowing up the welfare state and affecting the largest upward redistribution of wealth in American history is a politically tricky project (hence Romney's belief that he may need to forego a second term). Hence the Romney campaign's clear plan to suture off its slowly declining but still potent base. Romney’s political-policy theme is an unmistakable appeal to identity politics. 

SNIP

They don't care if they don't stand a shot in 2016 or a few cycles afterward, as long as they can ramrod the Ryan agenda starting in January 2013. They don't care if Romney is a one-term president, just as long as in that one term, he's able to end Medicare, cut taxes for the wealthy, and generally do anything and everything else that enables a massive transference of wealth from the lower- and middle-class families to the wealthy.

 

On a side note, this is also why anyone who thinks that Mitt Romney is too moderate for this sort of thing is so horribly wrong. The demographics are such that Republicans have to make hay while the white sun still shines. Grover Norquist said it already: Romney is nothing other than the robo-signer for the Ryan agenda, and 2012 is their last serious chance at getting it done for a long time, given their current base.

 This is the repugs do-or-die election. If they do it, the last shreds of a progressive, Democratic America will die.

 

That's why everyone has to vote.