Dave Weigel makes the point I have been trying to get across for at least the last month:

The problem is that spending austerity is not — as it was in the early months of 1993, for example — very high on voters’ minds, or even high on the list of reasons why voters remain cool on Republicans. In his response to the president’s State of the Union speech, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) argued that voters had “rightly” rejected the GOP because the party “got away from its principles” and “went along with earmarks and big government spending in Washington,” repeating an argument that Sen. John McCain made during the presidential campaign.

There is little polling to bolster this argument. Voters did not list government spending, or earmarks, or deficits, in their top concerns in the 2006 or 2008 national exit polls.

Indeed, the idea that the GOP lost these elections because of “wasteful spending” is most popular among activists and radio hosts, and for the last two years it has gained ground among the politicians who mistake these newly-satisfied activists and radio hosts for representatives of public opinion. The reduced numbers of the GOP in the House make it harder to recognize that their position as a losing one, because in the remaining safe Republican districts, where almost all of the anti-spending sentiment is concentrated, there probably is some strong, vocal opposition to these measures. It is the predicament of the GOP, which they brought upon themselves, that they have acquired a new responsiveness to constituents of these safe districts in response to their defeats on the one issue–spending–that is not even that important to these constituents, much less to the rest of the country.