Andrew Gelman has it can be perfectly rational for voters disgruntled with Democrats to vote Republican even if on balance they like Democrats better:
Those 10% or so of voters who plan to vote Republican—even while thinking that the Democrats will do a better job—are not necessarily being so unreasonable. The Democrats control the presidency and both houses of Congress, and so it’s a completely reasonable stance to prefer them to the Republicans yet still think they’ve gone too far and need a check on their power.
Quite true. The perception among liberals, of course, is that Obama, Reid, and Pelosi are constrained in how much they can do to aid the economy by the minority’s tools of obstruction. But the conventional way of looking at things is that if you’re not happy about the trajectory of events it must be because the governing party has “gone too far” and needs to be checked. Thus Democrats won a bunch of unlikely races in 2006 and will lose unlikely races in 2010.
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