As liberals this week publicly question whether some Democrat should primary President Obama, conservatives and Republicans should resist the temptation to become overconfident. If the 2012 presidential election were held today, President Obama would lose, but he wouldn’t lose by much — and more importantly the election isn’t for another 23 months.
This sometimes can be easy for conservatives — or anybody, for that matter — to forget. After all, a notable dynamic of our current partisan polarization is how it results in geographical homogeneity. Many congressional districts are either heavily Republican or heavily Democratic, and many of the evenly distributed districts depend on a balanced distribution of communities that are heavily partisan in one direction or the other. (My district, for example, is a swing district, but only because it combines heavily Republican counties with heavily Democratic ones.) What this means is that, a lot of the time, many of us do not really run into people whose views differ all that dramatically from ours, and it can be easy to forget that they actually exist!
