Republican Voters Pretty Sure 2012 Election Was Stolen By Non-Existent Organization

How badly are Republican voters taking the results of the 2012 election? Pretty badly, according to the latest numbers from Public Policy Polling. Fully one-quarter of the Republicans they surveyed want their state to secede from the Union, "compared to 56% who want to stay and 19% who aren't sure." That's a real blow for patriotism, and it also indicates that the word hasn't gotten out about the GOP's successes in redistricting. But if there's one part of the poll that sums up what a terrible place Republican voters are in, emotionally, it's this:

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore.

It's almost as if a large portion of the GOP electorate lives inside an impenetrable bubble of bullroar, or something? Of course, the same can be said of the Beltway media, as it turns out:

As much of an obsession as Bowles/Simpson can be for the DC pundit class, most Americans don't have an opinion about it. 23% support it, 16% oppose it, and 60% say they don't have a take one way or the other.

The 39% of Americans with an opinion about Bowles/Simpson is only slightly higher than the 25% with one about Panetta/Burns, a mythical Clinton Chief of Staff/former western Republican Senator combo we conceived of to test how many people would say they had an opinion even about something that doesn't exist.

The reason most Americans don't have an opinion on Simpson/Bowles is because Americans see the long term trajectory of the federal budget as an irrelevant issue, as compared to the current economic/unemployment crisis, which the media decided a long time ago to stop covering.

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