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This is a novel response to the concern that the GOP has become an exclusively southern party:
DeMint says he isn’t worried. He denied that the GOP has become a southern party, attributing Republican losses in the northeast to some northern voters who have left the region and moved south hoping to avoid labor unions and “forced unionization.” He said Americans will eventually come back into the Republican fold because of growing alarm about the size of government and President Obama’s fiscal policies.Huh. I am interested in your theories, Mr. DeMint, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter. I'd also like to remind the general audience that Jim DeMint is a United States Senator who serves on the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, the Committee on Foreign Relations, and the Joint Economic Committee. He is, in other words, a supposedly serious person doing serious work. And yet he appears to think that the United States has recently experienced a massive migration phenomenon as Northerners moved south to escape "forced unionization." Not only is this false on the merits, but it's not even the sort of intuitively true thing that later turns out to be false. It's just nonsense.Update: Turns out Jim DeMint isn't quite that crazy. CNN's Political Ticker blog unfairly paraphrased the quote. Kevin Drum has the actual transcript, and DeMint is saying something more along the lines of heavy union density is pushing Pennsylvania in a more liberal direction, which is a fairly banal argument.