Did The GOP Learn Its Lesson ?

The Democracy Corps Poll was conducted between October 6th and 8th of 950 2012 voters nationwide (with a 3.18 point margin of error).
The NBC News / Wall Street Journal Survey was done between October 7th and 9th of 800 nationwide adults (with a margin of error of 3.46 points).
The Pew Research Center Survey was done between October 9th and 13th of1,504 nationwide adults (with a margin of error of 2.9 points).

These three polls are not outliers. Poll after poll has shown the congressional Republicans have damaged the reputation of their own party significantly by shutting down the federal government (and threatening to force the government to default on its loans by refusing to raise the debt ceiling). This raises an important question -- did the Republicans learn their lesson from that mistake?

That question is important because the agreement that reopened the government (and raised the debt ceiling) only did so for about three months. Will the Republicans again take our economy hostage to try and force changes -- changes they could not win legislatively or at the ballot box? Will they shut down the government again next January 15th, and refuse to raise the debt ceiling three weeks after that?

Unfortunately, I think the possibility of another shutdown is real. Note that 144 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against the agreement (far more than voted for it). They voted to keep the government shut down and refuse to raise the debt ceiling. And there is a very good chance they will try to do that again in three months. And John Boehner, the weakest House Speaker ever, has no control over his own GOP caucus -- and may not be able to stop the shutdown (just like this time).

Now you may ask, don't they see they have made voters mad? They really don't care. These congressional Republicans are in "safe" Republican districts (thanks to gerrymandering), districts controlled by the teabagger element of the party -- and those teabaggers hate the president more than they love this country. They are perfectly willing to do serious damage to our economy (and reputation in the world) to keep the president from accomplishing anything at all.

But don't these teabaggers see that they are damaging the Republican Party nationally, and probably hurting any chance of a Republican inhabiting the White House for many years? No. These people don't live in the real world. They ignore both the polls and the demographics (because Fox News ignores both, and that's where they get all their "news"). These people still believe that they lost the last two national elections because they had poor candidates who couldn't properly enunciate the right-wing ideology. They think if they get the right candidate, one who can properly explain their ideology, the American people will flock to vote for them. They refuse to believe the fact that Americans understand their ideology, and rejected it.

Will the government be shut down again in a few months? It is very possible. The House-Senate conference committee on the budget is very unlikely to reach a compromise solution -- and that means we will be back to the same situation that caused this shutdown. And the Republicans, at least most of them, have learned nothing from this failed shutdown effort. Too many of them still believe they could have won if they had just held out longer.

There is only one solution for this mess -- to vote the Republicans out of power in 2014 (flip the House of Representatives). And the only good thing about this whole debacle, is that by refusing to learn from their mistakes the Republicans may well have made that a possibility.