Will Satan Sandwich Eaters Face The Consequences Of Their Betrayal At The Polls?

Before the vote on the Boehner/Obama SatanSandwich last week, Blue America announced that no incumbent who voted for it would be eligible for an endorsement this cycle under any circumstances. We also asked the challengers we endorsed to make a public statement explaining why they opposed the deal. Every single one of our challengers made that statement. One House incumbent running for a Senate seat voted for it and although she is still the runaway best candidate in the race in Hawai'i, we took her off our contribution list. Blue America didn't raise money for Obama in 2008 and, after seeing him in action, there was no chance we would ask our donors to contribute to his campaign next year, not that he needed us then or that he will now... not with the gigantic contributions he gets from Wall Street and other financial predators. Yesterday, Nate Silver did a column in the NY Times that seems to indicate Blue America isn't the only one outraged by the congressional betrayal inherent in a vote for the SatanSandwich.

Initial public reaction to the deficit-reducing deal reached by President Obama and Congress is fairly poor. Although there is some variance from survey to survey, on average approval of the deal registers at 38 percent against 49 percent disapproval across four national polls conducted on it so far.

...Of the 63 Republicans running for re-election to the House in districts that the nonpartisan Cook Political Report deems competitive, 56 of them, or 89 percent, voted for the deal.

Democrats have fewer members running in swing districts in the House, simply because they lost so many of them in 2010. Still, among Democrats who are running in competitive races, the tally was 23-to-14 in favor of the bill, whereas the majority of Democrats in safe districts voted against it. ...In the House, members of the liberal Congressional Progressive Caucus overwhelmingly voted against the bill, with 56 of the 70 members voted opposing it, while other Democrats voted for the bill by roughly a 2-1 margin. A 32-to-28 majority of Republicans in the Tea Party Caucus, meanwhile, voted for the bill-- but they were less likely to do so than other Republicans in the House, who approved the bill by a 72-to-19 margin. ... Among Republicans not affiliated with Tea Party, 91 percent of those in competitive districts voted for the bill, while 62 percent of those not running in competitive races did.

...Anti-incumbent sentiment is probably stronger now than at any point since polling began. We don’t know exactly how that is going to play out, and to some extent we are in uncharted territory.

But the polling so far suggests that the risks are particularly acute for Congress-- and even more acute for the Republicans in Congress, who were more likely to vote for the bill and are being assigned more responsibility for it by the public.

Bernie Sanders had a much better idea about how to reduce the federal deficit than the ineffectual gimmicks that make up the SatanSandwich. Take a look:



UPDATE

A little frank Twitter chit chat with the Chairman. Because there are times when nothing will do but tough love-- and this is one of those times: