Though normally it's homemade, still thin mints and those coconut and caramel striped Samoans are my favorite girl scouts cookies.




We will get a lot, first, voting for someone in '08 doesn't imply deep passion, probably a good 20% or so of the people who vote really pretty much shrug win or lose. Many voted for him in a spirit of change or feel good, and that ship has mostly sailed. McCain was old and not charismatic, and Palin fired up a lot of the base but scared many off, this will likely not be the case this time.

Now, of actual people who genuinely supported him, will we get converts? Sure, we always do, a pretty large portion of Republicans are ex-liberals, often very passionate ones. Republicans consistently having a larger proportional share of older voters is likely not caused by republicans registering later, and I know plenty including myself. I know a lot of dedicated and active republicans because I'm really not joking about the meetings, and anecdotally I'd say about a third to a half of them were former liberals.




In terms of liberal converts Tax/Economy usually doesn't play into it much. In my experience the most common is getting fed up with one's allies. Some learn to cope with it, some just drop out of active interest, some flee to the Greens or Libertarians, but an awful lot make their way to the GOP, and the flow is mostly one way.



Fortunately high unemployment numbers and record deficits make for short and clear sound bites.



Discussion of that would take a long, long time, so I'll leave at 'disagree almost entirely' and Bush came in when the economy wasn't too sweet either, one could argue that inherited recession or not, and the Democrats in many ways inherited the recession from themselves, Obama's had 3 years and not only failed to improve things but made them worse. We can discuss the details of that if you want but for our purposes here 'perception' is all that matters and people increasingly see this economy as being in Obama's lap.



Yes, I do actually know several friends or acquaintances off the top of my head who pulled the proverbial lever for him in '08 and are now solidly opposed. The #1 cited reason has typically been "I can't believe I voted for that guy".