The latest gallup information that everyone is talking about should be quite alarming for Republicans:
The decline in Republican Party affiliation among Americans in recent years is well documented, but a Gallup analysis now shows that this movement away from the GOP has occurred among nearly every major demographic subgroup. Since the first year of George W. Bush’s presidency in 2001, the Republican Party has maintained its support only among frequent churchgoers, with conservatives and senior citizens showing minimal decline.
This actually is how realignments happen.
Two quick thoughts. First, if the Obama administration is a disaster, the Republicans will quickly rebound. Hell, if in eight years, Obama’s team turns out to have been useless and worthless as the Bush administration, I will have no problem sticking a shiv in them and the Democratic party. If you thought otherwise, you haven’t been paying attention. I’ll never be a Republican again, though.
Second, what will be the most fun about the next couple of days is watching Republicans try to deny or ignore these findings. Everything is fine! We just need to get back to our core principles! This is nothing a little poem or interpretive dance can’t fix! You betcha!
gbear
My favorite part of that survey is that they only lost one point of non-white support, which means they probably went from a 5% favorable rating to 4%.
Oh, and nice job, churchgoers. Stay focused.
yam
Nonsense — this is just the party going through growing pains. By growing, I mean shrinking. By shrinking, I really mean collecting the Conservativest of the Conservatives.
In other words, this is good news for the Republicans.
Cat Lady
Old white southern god-botherers. Yeah, keep digging guys.
MikeJ
They may have held steady with churchgoers, but fortunately, that number is dropping.
SpotWeld
The really interesting thing is that the loudest and most influential voices in the GOP seem to be doing nothing to change that trend. They are investing in all the same talking points and political positions that got Bush elected in the first place.
While a political disaster on the scale of the Clinton scandal could swing things back into the GOP’s favor, it’s like they are admitting thier poltical fortunes will be determined solely by happenstance, not actual ability.
Sort of like being a back-bencher and knowing the only way you’ll ever get to play is if the someone spikes the first-string’s gatoraide with swine flu.
dmsilev
That’s easy. Watch me think like a Republican (kids, don’t try this at home):
I’m also morbidly curious to meet some of the 9% of people who describe themselves as being of “liberal ideology” who are still Republicans.
-dms
-dms
SGEW
. . . I will eat my fucking hat.
opium4themasses
What gets me is they had 17% support amongst those with a liberal ideology. I guess every side has it’s 20ish-percenters.
I guess I am confused as to what definition of liberal ideology they are using also.
Also, as MikeJ pointed out, this is a percentage of sub-populations not populations. The numbers aren’t necessarily meaningful. Just like all the silliness about various performances in various demographics. This may all be just so much tea-leaf reading.
Still, any interpretation tends towards negative.
MikeJ
Disaster? When Clinton left office he had a higher approval rating than Reagan had.
schrodinger's cat
God botherer, Douthat’s NYT column is hilarious, apparently you have to choose between Jesus and Dan Brown and you can’t have both.
Thomas Levenson
My question is this a remake of the whig movie, or a return to the Roosevelt realignment.
I think the external conditions are more like Roosevelt’s circumstances. But the sheer lack of stature within the plausible (sic) claimants to national leadership amongst the elephants makes it at least plausible that the party could fracture and produce some genuinely new coalitions out of the shrapnel.
And even if Obama fails, some of those fractures are real enough and deep enough — older religious conservatives vs. younger techno-geek secular types and so on — that the GOP is a good candidate for a good bit of autophagy for awhile.
Thomas Levenson
oops. hit the button twice.
So…what to say second time out: mostly that I am enjoying watching the GOP go into the political equivalent of a piercing-and-tatting phase that will end up with the party (metaphorically) looking like this: http://isiria.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/tattooconventionberlin2007.jpg
Ash Can
@opium4themasses:
Maybe they’re applying the very classical definition of the term to themselves, as in, zero government regulation of business concerns and financiers.
Joshua Norton
I think we should wait for the next Zogby poll telling us how the entire world and all life in outer space supports the Republican agenda before making any rash decisions about the gigantic FAIL that is the American right wing.
Micheline
The Republicans always find a way to rebound. They said this after Barry Goldwater, Watergate, Carter. The Democrats are their own worst enemies.
scav
Liberal could just mean they’d use smaller stones during their public executions, so, given their local environment, they’d see and describe themselves as liberal. They might even inhale!
MattF
@opium4themasses
Once upon a time, there were liberal Republicans. In fact, not so long ago, my congressperson was Connie Morella– who was more liberal than most Democrats. I don’t know if she’s still officially a Republican– but it’s quite possible.
Bootlegger
@dmsilev:
In survey research methodology its called “measurement error”. In this case either a failure to give the “true” answer or, just as likely, a failure to understand what the terms “liberal” or “Republican” mean. Of course there could be a couple percent who simply enjoy the buzz of constant cognitive dissonance.
LD50
I think the Steele will trumpet how they’ve only declined 2% among Black voters. The awkward fact that this means that their market share among blacks dropped from 3% total to 1% will be ignored.
sgwhiteinfla
John Cole
Uhmm you are a little late, Mike Steele is already in spin mode. He says the GOP has “turned the corner”.
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/republican-national-committee/steele-claims-gop-has-turned-corner-but-polls-show-otherwise/
Bill E Pilgrim
Hey I’ve been plagiarized!
@Bill E Pilgrim:
“You’re down to 20 percent”
“No we’re not. It’s just a flesh wound!”
I guess that just makes me trendy.
Bootlegger
@Bill E Pilgrim: “What are you going to do? Bleed on me?”
e.c.
@MikeJ:
Exactly, which means these numbers are even worse than they look on first reading. Aside from the slip in those attending church and identifying with religion, the age groups are also in flux with older voters becoming a smaller portion of the electorate and younger voters set to almost double their percentage of voters in the next 10 years or so. They are bleeding support among the groups most set to dominate politics for the next generation.
The Moar You Know
@sgwhiteinfla: One could say that Steele is claiming that the party has hit “Peak Wingnut”.
We’ve seen how well those prognostications have worked out.
wasabi gasp
Yeah, and they got some more peanut butter on their chocolate.
Persia
I will still never vote Republican. I might vote for individual candidates, as I always have, but I will never be part of that party. They’ve lost me, probably forever. And I’m 33. I have a hell of a lot of voting left to do.
Anton Sirius
@schrodinger’s cat:
Since Jesus is a much better writer, that’s not a tough call.
adolphus
What’s always been curious to me is the relatively high approval ratings Republicans have historically (last 25 years) enjoyed among college graduates until this recent poll. According to the right our college campuses were supposedly seething with socialists and anti-Americanists turning the nation’s youth into Communists, pederasts, and teh gay. If they were right, (and they couldn’t have been making a social issue out of thin air, could they?) then these professors were the worst proselytizers EVER.
I guess what they needed this whole time was a popular,photogenic leader for their Big Brother posters. Now, well……
Anton Sirius
@Thomas Levenson:
Quite frankly, I’m wondering what’s taking the right wing so long.
The GOP is dead. Dead dead dead dead dead. They ain’t coming back. The longer the right waits before starting the process of building up a new national party, the longer they’ll be on the outside looking in.
El Cid
While I think it’s always possible for some sort of Republican / right wing rebound, I am very curious about how this could likely happen.
They cannot do the same thing they’ve done for the last 40 years — depend upon the continuous migration to the Republican Party of Southern and Western whites leaving the Democratic Party post-Civil Rights.
I think that they’ve long passed Peak Southern Strategy, in fact, I think they’ve gathered up every Southern and Western conservative white vote they were going to get. There is no more population of conservative whites in the South and West waiting to abandon a historic attachment to the Democratic Party reaching back to the days of segregation and one-party rule.
The only scenario I’ve seen as possible is a return to the economically moderate, more corporate business favoring than the Democrats but not simply insane anti-regulatory nuts while socially liberal and only moderate more religious Republican Party of the first half of the 20th century.
This Republican Party could be more competitive in the Northeast and Midwest instead of being shut-out.
I know the crazies won’t let the party go, but on the other side, there are a lot of moderate conservatives in the Northeast and Midwest who are going to want to run as a distinctly different party. This doesn’t presume that Democrats are actually something other than business moderates.
nepat
Curious formulation. There is quite literally almost no chance the Obama administration will be a disaster. Even mediocrity will look like genius. The only direction forward after Bush is up.
Let’s face it, Obama’s first term will be – regrettably – custodial. That is, Cleaning Up After Bush. An honest assessment of his achievements will have to include the ways in which he a). spares us all from economic doom, b). leads us out of these misbegotten wars, c). restores our reputation throughout the world, d). asserts the pre-eminence of our core democratic values (small “d”).
The administration is on track for all these things. Probably not as quickly as many would like but nothing ever happens quickly enough in ADHD Nation.
NonyNony
@Anton Sirius:
If you’re holding out on some writing that Jesus has done, the community of Biblical scholars would like to have a word with you. Actual text committed to paper by Jesus would be like finding the Holy Grail.
In fact, most scholars are pretty sure that given where Jesus was raised and preached, he was probably illiterate.
Of course, given the principle of “do no harm”, that still probably makes him a better writer than Dan Brown…
anonevent
@Bootlegger: This also looks like the results of a procedure in the stats book I am reading for dealing with small sample sizes that only have one of the two expected values: Add 2 samples to each of the values, for a total of four imaginary samples. Given an original sample size of 20 that has all no answers, this can cause the yes to have a range from 0-19%.
Though this may be one of the few times where the statistician’s desire to not report a zero value may be misplaced.
Miriam
People may not identify as Republicans, but when the time comes will they vote Republican?
Look at Evan Bayh and the rest of the DINOs in congress. Who cares that they have a D by their name if they consistently obstruct progressive legislation and Obama’s nominees?
Phaedrus
Obama has shown the Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin when it comes to basic civil rights. To me this is primary, all other issues (foreign policy, social services, etc.) are secondary – the core civil liberties and rule of law are what make this country possible, and we’re losing them.
So, yay, the truly crazy people who don’t believe in civil rights are losing and the social concerned people who don’t believe in civil rights are wining. Overall, we lose.
NonyNony
@El Cid:
A couple of different thoughts come to mind –
The GOP could become a real regional party with a stranglehold on the South. If they commit to that, that leaves the Northeastern economic conservatives/social liberals room to open up their own party – probably called something else. They would be natural allies on economic issues with the Southern Republicans and not much else.
I think, barring the rise of a charismatic politician who can re-unite the regional factions, that’s the most likely course for reforming the GOP. The crazies need to keep control of a “Republican Party” but a new party will grow up to take the niche of an economically conservative party.
Now, if “economically conservative” just means “pro Big Business”, well, the Democrats can fill that niche as well as anyone else. That could mean that a more left-leaning party rises up in the northeast that steals votes from the Democrats, driving northeastern Democrats to be a bit more conservative and pick off the last of those straggling Republican voters. Such a move would make it unlikely that the Republican Party would rise from its status as a regional party, but they would probably often ally with the conservative Democratic Party on economic issues. That’s probably not likely, but it would amuse me.
Brick Oven Bill
The reason that Republicans are the first to become disillusioned with the two party system is because they interact with society by taking an active part in the economy. They have a greater sense of situational awareness and see that even though the Republicans are marginally less corrupt than the Democrats, the two-party system has been taken over by the Goldman-Sachs lobby.
Democrats still put their faith in Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and some guy who reads other people’s words from a teleprompter and appoints Geithner with his Chief of Staff Goldman Sachs lobbyist. Print print print.
The college graduate demographic are Believers. I voted for the Democratic candidate right out of college too. These people have not likely interacted in a work environment with the Black demographic, who overwhelmingly support public benefits for themselves, as evidenced by their polling numbers.
At least the Republican numbers are not significantly falling within the Black population. Only 0.25% per year.
Librarian
The GOP decline will not mean a damned thing as long as the Democrats keep on continuing so many of the Bush-Cheney policies and continue to accept GOP framing of so many issues. I refer to all the constitutional and national security issues- military commissions, state secrets, bombing the hell out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, etc. As long as this continues, it legitimizes the GOP’s positions on these issues and makes its return more likely, and you might as well still have the GOP in power. But of course, the Democrats still seem to buy into GOP framing and to be terrified of looking weak.
dbrown
It isn’t that repub-a-thugs are losing voters but that voters are losing their way from true principles that these cowards represent – just like the so-called human induced global warming: this can’t be true because we would then have a responsibility to crub it and any action to stem AGW will cause job losses so that is evil. Yet out-sourcing American middle class jobs (especially union ones) to China or India is fine since profits for corporations and their elite investors only then go up. I really think that many American middle class workers just don’t get it (that is, if a scandal can somehow justify voting for these liars again); repub-a-thugs are only about profits for the elite, and have never been about American families or Christian values or even ethics as applied to American business – that is, before Regan and his crap where American’s traded away their souls for short term profits and long term debt and deregulation that lead to us being taking to the cleaners (S&L defaults anyone?) These monsters have always and will always appeal to many Americans false belief that they too can be wealthy like the ultra-elite or how most of these people are so stupid that the top 15% or so of American economic pie think they are, in fact, in the top 1% for earnings … go figure their incredible lack of understanding and their ready nature to help the real elite against their own economic interest.
Brick Oven Bill
The majority of campaign contributions from the financial industry went to the Democratic Party dbrown. In exchange for these campaign contributions, the financial industry was allowed to select the Treasury Secretary, and his staff.
This is why they are getting money.
Bootlegger
@Brick Oven Bill: Thats
some-guy-who-reads-other-people’s-words-from-a-teleprompter IN CHIEF to you buddy. Yes, its sad that he’s the first politician to read speeches from a teleprompter.
Bootlegger
@Brick Oven Bill: And a big chunk went to the Republicans too, just in case.
carlton rogers
Google ‘language log the dan brown code’ to see a brief essay by a language maven about what makes DB’s writing so terrible.
Comrade Darkness
@Bootlegger, some of that 9% are social liberals that are fiscal conservatives and finances trump the social ideology. The number went from 17 to 9 because the republicans aren’t fiscal conservatives any more than my aunt betty is a racehorse.
mclaren
First, there’s zero likelihood that the Obama administration will be as destructive or as toxic as the maladministration of the drunk-driving C student over the last 8 years. The loons in the White House for the last 8 years weren’t just useless and worthless, they actively worked to wreck most of our basic American institutions — the civil service, the U.S. military, FEMA, oversight agencies like the EPA and FDA, NASA, government-funded science, Wall Street by systematically removing accountability and oversight, the congress (including turning off the lights and shutting off the mics when Democrats tried to hold hearings that might have embarrassed the GOP majority)…the list goes on.
Clearly Obama is not going to be a disaster like the previous maladministration.
What worries me, though, is that Obama is a sensible pragmatic moderate, and all the early evidence shows that he’s choosing the most moderate course possible. Unfortunately, this means in most cases no systemic reform. Example: Geithner’s plan essentially preserves Wall Street and the rating companies like Moody’s as is. Yes, Obama is moving to regulate the huge “shadow banking” system, but that’s just not enough. Without basic systemic reform, we’re going to get a much worse replay of the recent global financial meltdown because the bond rating agencies like Moody’s have learnt there’s no penalty for lying their asses off about toxic assets, and the investment houses have learnt that if they screw up, they just get oceans of taxpayer money to bail them out.
Likewise, the Senate just the other day turned down a bill that would have capped credit card rates at 15%. We are now entering our 28th year with no usury caps in America. That’s insane. A society cannot survive if unlimited interest rates, no civilization in the last 5000 years has been able to allow unlimited interest rates, it’s unsustainable. But Obama isn’t pushing for a national usury cap because it would mean deep systemic change, and could threaten the viability of the larger banks, who right now are making back their incredible losses in the subprime market by shafting consumers with 35% credit card rates.
Likewise Obama’s decision to take single-payer health insurance off the table. I understand his reasoning, he knows it’ll be a colossal job just to get any national health insurance program through congress, much less single-payer. But without single-payer, the situation becomes unsustainable. Figures I’ve heard bandied about right now are $400 a month for national private health insurance for one person. That sounds okay today, but let’s recall that medical costs are skyrocketing at 20% per year. That means that every 3.6 years, the cost doubles. So 3.6 years from now that $400 turns into $800 a month, and 7.2 years from now it explodes to $1600 a moth. 11.2 years from now that federally mandated private insurance program will cost $3200 a month, and at that point, the camel’s back will break. Ordinary people can’t afford $3200 a month for health insurance. The median 2-earner income nationwide right now is around $38,000 per year.
We see the same problem with Obama’s foreign wars. The moderate course involves stepping down the tempo of the operations in Iraq and trying to shore up Afghanistan, but what we’re seeing is that whatever the U.S> military does, it’s got hold of a tarbaby in both Iraq and Afghanistan and now Pakistan. The only viable solution here is to back off. More: we need to radically scale back America’s ambitions as globocop. We can’t do it. No nation can do it. It’s impossible. We need to leave Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan alone, and if they fall apart into chaos, that’s life. America is not the world’s nanny. The claims that the Taliban is able to take over Pakistan are absurd and contradicted by overwhelming evidence — the Taliban forms a tiny minority and dominates Pakistan only in outlying rural areas. Pakistan is a modern secular society, quite different from Iraq.
The point is that Obama’s instinct toward moderate centrism, while admirable, spells disaster in this current crisis. We have reached a point where moderate middle-of-the road policies just aren’t going to work. Business as usual with the U.S. military gobbling 1.4 trillion dollars per year, the banking industry continuing to charge 35% on consumer credit cards, Wall Street continuing to go without substantial reform, it’s all just snowballing. We can’t keep on like this. There’s going to be a blowup. At some point the rest of the world will refuse to bankroll our endless lost wars in 3rd world hellholes and our endless casino capitalism based on scams and bogus bond ratings that aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.
John Cole said he’s tired of hearing people like me and he said I’m whining. Back in 2000, during the first debate between Gore and the drunk-driving C student, I looked at the rest of the people who were watching that debate and said, “This Bush guy is a creep and an idiot. If he gets in, this country is in real trouble.”
Everyone else reacted just like John Cole — they told me they were tired of hearing that kind of crap, they told me I was shining. They told me to knock it off. Bush was a great guy, he was charming and had a rough-hewn eloquence, and blah blah yadda yadda.
Guess what?
The John Coles of the world were wrong. I picked up on Bush’s sociopathic incompetence and stupidity on day one of that debate. The John Coles of the world didn’t.
Then during the run-up to the Iraq war I told people, “This sounds like a giant clusterf**k.” And once again, the John Coles of the world told me they were tired of hearing this kind of crap from me, and they said I was a whining. And they told me to cut it out.
And guess what?
Turns out I picked up on how badly screwed were going to be, but the John Coles of the world didn’t see it coming.
Then during the 2004 election, I told everyone I knew, “If these guys get re-elected, this country is going to be in seriouslydeep trouble. I don’t just mean high deficits or unpopular polls, I mean everything will break. It’s all going to go south. I mean this administration is going to end like Tony Montana at the end of the SCARFACE remake from 1980.”
And once again, the John Coles of the world announced they were tired of hearing this kind of crap from whiny radicals like me, and they didn’t want to hear any more of this stuff, and they told me to shut up and knock it off.
So guess what?
Yeah, I don’t have to tell you. You already know.
I’m getting the same vibe here. Maybe I’m wrong. But there has got to be serious systemic change, because America is continuing to do a whole bunch of things which are completely unsustainable
And I don’t just mean “the electorate won’t like it,” or “we’ll run big deficits.” I mean there’s going to be a breakdown in the whole system if it continues to be legal to charge 391% interest on payday loans in America, and if Moody’s can continue to rate garbage corporate bonds as AAA paper, and if the U.S> military continues to grow at its current rate and keeps on fighting losing guerilla wars all over the world and if we keep outsourcing all the white-collar skilled jobs out of America to the third world, and if we don’t radically and fundamentally reform health care to a single-payer system under tight government control so that big pharma can’t spend twice as much per year on advertising as it does on R&D, and doctors can’t continue to tell injured that they’re underinsured, so which of your severed fingers would you like me to sew back on, because you can only get one finger sewed back on and not all four?
I don’t know what’s going to happen if we don’t fundamentally fix the broken systems in America, but it’s going to be drastic. The possibilities range from civil war (very unlikely) to massive institutional corruption and an end result something like the central European/asian/Russian “stan” countries (Turkmenistan, etc.) where gangsters basically run everything and nothing works and the government has no real power (possible but improbable), to a massive meltdown like Japan the whole society just settles into a geriatric permanent semi-depression and kids continue to live with their parents even at age 50 and there are no jobs and no economic growth (more possible), to a situation where the rest of the world’s central banks basically tell America we can’t play globocop anymore and the dollar winds up losing its global reserve currency status and America gets forced to take the kind of IMF-austerity-measure economic medicine the first world formerly doled out to banana republics in central America when their economies went bust.
I don’t see the War on Drugs winding down in any meaningful way — on the contrary, we’re shipping even more military weaponry and troops to Mexico and their country is blowing apart just like Columbia did, except this time, they’re on our border. And when the Mexican cartel killers start tossing severed heads in bowling alleys in Phoenix AZ and San Diego CA and Taos NM, it’s gonna get real ugly real fast.
The DHS budget has exploded from 20 billion to over 50 billion with no end in sight. Right now, the DHS has a doubling rate of 5 years, which means that within 18 years the DHS will rival the Pentagon in government funding.
Now I’m really going to surprise you, John, because you called me a radical, but I don’t fin it funny or thrilling that the Republican Party has melted down and is now disintegrating. Because America needs a sensible level-headed conservative party to fight this crazy growth in the police-terrorism-military industrial complex.
I don’t see anyone screaming about the explosive growth of quasi-KGB bureaucracies like the DHS with their attendant universal warrantless wiretapping and warning that there’s huge trouble ahead unless we cut back on the DHS, preferably get rid of it entirely, shut down evil agencies like the TSA, shut down the DEA, and radically scale back the U.S. military-industrial complex and financial-medical-industrial complex. These institutions are fundamentally inimical to an open democratic society based on the Enlightenment values of transparency and accountability and evidence-based policy.
Either we have to move away form Enlightenment values back to superstition and ideology and witch hunts (we’ve had 28 years of that starting with the senile sociopath Ronald Reagan), or we have to massively reform the military-police-terrorism industrial complex and the Wall Street-Cedar Sinai financial-medical-industrial complex that’s sucking 80% of the gains in our economy to the top 20% of the population and moving the bottom 80% of Americans toward being the working poor. You can’t sustain a democracy under those conditions.
Maybe I’m wrong. But it looks we’ve run out of maneuvering room. We can’t kick the can down the road anymore, not with an 1.85 trillion dollar deficit (which will doubtless grow to over 2 trillion by tend of this year as things worsen), not with 2 losing wars and third one in Pakistan on the way, not with bankers taking more 20 million dollar bonuses after they get bailed out while congressmen introduce legislation to legalize 391% payday loans. There’s a point at which American society can’t sustain this kind of crazy behavior, and it looks to me like we’ve reached that point right now, today.
So before you tell me you’re tired of hearing this kind of stuff, John, and before you tell me to stuff a sock in it…bear in mind you’ve got a very poor track record of picking up on these kind of looming problems. I saw ’em coming years and years ago, back in 2000. Before you try to marginalize me as a “radical” for pointing out that American can’t continue all these unsustainable policies like the War on Drugs and the endless losing foreign wars and the endlessly escalating medical costs with endless cutbacks on people who can be insured and the endless outsourcing of skilled jobs overseas… Think about it for a minute.
People like me have been right for the last 9 years. People like you have a very poor track record of picking up on these kinds of unsustainable trends over the last 98 years.
I wish Obama well. He’s obviously infinitely better than McCain-Palin, or the loons we’ve had running things for the last 8 years. What I see in Obama, though, is a smart sensible moderate guy kicking the can down the road, and we can’t do that anymore. America hs 5% of the world’s population 25% of the world’s prisoners behind bars. America has got 5% of the world’s population and we’re sucking up 20% of the world’ resources. We’ve got 5% of the world’s population and we account for 50% of world military spending. America spends as much on our medical-industral complex, around 17% of GDP, as the Soviets spent on their military, and we’ve got even less to show for it.
When I look at Obama, I see a guy who figures we can finesse things until the situation turns around the market fixes things of its own accord. That’s not going to work this time. We need to fix a lot of our broken institutions at a systemic level, and I don’t see any indication of that from Obama, not on the issue of truth and reconciliation commissions about torture, not about reforming Wall Street, not about single-payer health care, none of it.
We can’t keep on with business as usual and middle-of-the-road policies. If we try, America is headed for a big crash. Before you ridicule me, think back — were you right about which candidate you supported in 2000? Were you right about Iraq in 2003? Were you right about the re-election in 2004?
Ask yourself if you might not be making the same mistake when you condemn people like me today.
Fulcanelli
FWIW John, the bar is so low regarding Obama and his administration’s job performance with the majority of the public and really any sentient beings with a pulse after 8 years of the Bush junta that if they can just keep the name of this country the United States of America after just 4 years they will be solidly in the WIN column.
And after watching the steady drip, drip, drip of damning revelations about the Bush Administration and the Republican dominated congress in just the first few months with, I’m sure much, much more to come over the next four years dominating countless news cycles every week, If you think the Republicans are just going to bounce back like Bush never happened then maybe you did whack your head on the commode last night. It’s not gonna happen. Period. And if it did, you wouldn’t want to live here.
Lastly, some friendly advice regarding party politics and our two party system. If your political identity is tied even close to lockstep with either of the two dominant parties you are destined to be pissed off and disappointed no matter who is in control. What is more important is to keep whoever is in power as honest as humanly possible and fully cognizant of who’s the fucking boss here.
We are. Not the Lobbyists. Not Big Business. Not Israel. Not the Palestinians. Not the Press. Not unelected leaders on Wall Street and in the Banks. The Constitution and our laws say so. Make sure our laws against corruption and greed are enforced and have teeth.
Make this your guiding political principal and it won’t matter much which side is swaying the process a degree or two one way or the other. We’ll then have good representative government. And we win for a change. We haven’t been winning for over a generation and it shows.
And for the record, I don’t think the Republican base would want you back unless you were born again…
geg6
Oh, BOB, going for the racist theme again, I see.
Or maybe college graduates have enough varied experiences with people of other races, faiths, socio-economic, and sexes that they don’t really like bigots or the politicians who respresent them. Of course, as I have seen every day, there is still that small minority of college graduates/students who are small-minded bigots regardless of the variety of experiences they have and people they meet along the way. Must be the BOB demographic.
omen
questionable oven forget to include obama is an illegal alien.
JasonF
@MattF:
No kidding? I grew up in Connie’s district. She was A Republican, but 100% aligned with the Rockefeller wing of the party. If she were still in Congress today, they’d be running her out of the party on a rail.
To give people an idea of how good she was, she served from the mid-80s until 2002. In 2002, the Democratic-controlled Maryland state legislature had redistricted the state in an effort to oust her. She was pitted against Chris Van Hollen. Rep. Van Hollen won 52-48. Two years later, when Rep. Van Hollen was running against a more typical Republican, he won 75-25.
In short, Rep. Morella was a Republican who kept winning in a heavily Democratic area because she was one of the good ones.
omen
@mclaren:
geez, mclaren, what’s with the martyr complex?
Fencedude
@schrodinger’s cat:
Actually, I’d really rather have neither. Is that an option?
Anton Sirius
@NonyNony:
Precisely.
aimai
I read the graph title as “Lemming Party Affiliations.” That is all.
aimai
Brick Oven Bill
Re: ‘maladministration of the drunk-driving C student over the last 8 years’
I observe the demographics of punters and bowlers, and then sprinters and jumpers, and note differences geg6. I attribute these differences to a thing called ‘Evolution’.
Liberal Arts schools, which rarely teach liberal arts by the way, deny these differences, and argue a theory of ‘Creation’. While I am incapable of comprehending the origins of Creation, I can observe the effects of 30,000 of environment-based evolution since man ventured out of eastern Africa in search of food. I believe the Creationism taught in modern education to be full of crap.
Different does not necessarily mean ‘bad’, as we are all a combination of good and evil. But if failure to deny human biodiversity makes me a bigot in the dogma of the modern left, I am guilty as charged. These differences explain, in my mind, why blacks tend to vote as a block for the Democratic Party.
This is also why tolerant Americans did not demand that Obama present his college transcript for review and criticism, as all of his predecessors had done. I view this as the bigotry of low expectations. This type of bigotry really is more damaging to society than acknowledging differences geg6.
Anton Sirius
I must say, I’m somewhat taken with BOB’s vision of an America filled with Democrats who have managed to completely remove themselves from the economy.
Who knew it would be the Dems who went Galt first?
Xecky Gilchrist
This is nothing a little poem or interpretive dance can’t fix! You betcha!
You’ve hinted here at the real solution: never misunderestimate the Power of the Starbursts.
MysticalChick
This made me literally guffaw at my desk. Gigantic FAIL for sure. And they keep on getting worse and worse.
Adrienne
The one group that should scare the living bejeezus out of the Repubs is the 18-29. I just read that in 2020, Millenials (my awesome generation) will be just under 40% (ZOMG!)of the voting eligible public. This should make them shit their pants. Make sure to also follow and read the links on the bottom of the page.
By and large, my generation wants, in broad terms, exactly the OPPOSITE of the present day GOP is offering: We want a strong, competent, socially responsible and responsive government that leverages its power to help everyday Americans and solve big problems but also stays the hell out of individuals’ personal decisions – especially with regards to sex, reproduction, and lifestyle. You can’t get much further away from the GOP platform than that. You just can’t.
h/t: Sully’s place.
Bill Belichick
After looking at that chart the solution is obvious. New Fed Law requiring mandatory attendance at weekly church service. We’ll get Tom Delay to handle it, he did yeomans work on that preposterous redistricting problem a while back. He’s available. He’s pious.
jcricket
Right, the GOP has turned the corner, right into the path of the oncoming truck.
There’s plenty of paths for the GOP to retake a big portion of America – but I’d say time is running out. If they wait another 8+ years, it’ll probably be too late. With all the rising demographics they’d have hemorraged so much support (hispanics, college graduates, non-religious people) that those political preferences will cement the GOP to regional minority status forever.
Of course if they decide to change course right now, they’ll still lose for another 4-8 years (as wingnuts stay home) – but as Obama proves, you have to play long ball to win.
Oh, and you have to be right. So the “optimist” in me says there’s no hope for the GOP even if they do become “Libertarian” – that political philosophy is as wrong and outdated as social conservativism.
Bootlegger
@Comrade Darkness: Correct, which is still measurement error because the term “liberal” as a survey response is not sufficient to capture people with more complex positions like the one you describe.
Tsulagi
I’m thinking even some of that support might be a little soft if my mom (and she says some of her friends) is any indication. Though she’s been backsliding a bit these past five years, she still goes to church nearly every Sunday and still frequently volunteers to do some of their charitable work.
But she’s really put off by the hard mixing of politics and religion. She also hasn’t missed seeing the pandering by the Pub party, nor the frequent hypocrisy of holy R-politicians or guys like Haggard. You remember Haggard: “I did not have sex with that gay hooker I paid for nor snort the crystal meth I bought from him.” He’s right up there in that rarified upper R-theocon realm with the double wetsuit/single dildo BDSM self-snuffing reverend.
Ticked dad off a little since they’ve both always voted R together, but mom voted Obama. Dad, though finally disgusted with the Party of Brain-Dead Bushism, couldn’t bring himself to do that, so he wrote in Ron Paul as a protest vote. I now have the fun of telling him his party now thinks he’s an unreal American, unpure, suck-ass RINO.
Aaron
I wish they had included LGBT people in this poll. It would be interesting to know how the number of gay republicans has fared. But, of course, we usually get ignored in these sorts of things.
omen
@Brick Oven Bill:
why tolerant Americans did not demand that Obama present his college transcript for review and criticism, as all of his predecessors had done. I view this as the bigotry of low expectations. This type of bigotry really is more damaging to society than acknowledging differences
obama graduated from harvard magna cum laude. what more do you need to know?
Comrade Kevin
Some Republican Interpretive Dance
omen
@Brick Oven Bill:
from the notoriously liberal weekly standard:
The only reason I bring this barely relevant history up is to show what a stud of a law student Barack Obama was. He graduated Harvard magna cum laude. This was one honor you unquestionably had to earn. It’s a very impressive feat. Back in Obama’s days at Harvard, more than 50 percent of the class graduated cum laude, a fact that made graduating “with honors” a meaningless accomplishment. But graduating magna was a different kettle of fish. Barack Obama graduated right near the top of his law school class.
just because the left assailed bush supporters as being guilty of “soft bigotry of low expectations” doesn’t mean the phrase is recyclable and applicable to obama. how about you and the rest of your party develop criticism that isn’t a straight rip-off from the left.
IndieTarheel
@Brick Oven Bill:
Don’t suppose you have a cite showing that all candidates for the office of POTUS submitted their transcripts for inspection?
Also, the only people I see yapping about his transcript are the same bunch of geniuses wailing Glenn Beck-esque tears over his birth certificate (knowing full well that even had they been present for the birth itself, Sam Beckett-style, they simply would have invented another “reason” for their poutrage).
The REAL source of their discontent is as clear as glass, and no one with two firing synapses to rub together is fooled by the smoke and mirrors because the stench of the BS is overpowering.
omen
did you know pollsters have a formula to adjust for the “how often do you attend church” question. something like 5 %. this question is notorious for people lying about the answer.
Notorious P.A.T.
I agree.
Houston Bridges
In solidarity with your closing paragraphs, I’m not a Democrat just because I despise Republicans, especially pseudo-Christian, conservative, Southern Republicans. They, as a group, have been on the wrong side of every moral challenge this country has ever had. That does not make me a Democrat, although in truth I have voted for Democrats 99.9% of the times I have voted.
I wish there were viable alternatives.
Brick Oven Bill
If Obama is an academic achiever, then why would he hide his transcript? Something does not make sense Omen.
Indie Tarheel; please explain the true source of my discontent.
omen
@Brick Oven Bill:
it’s a conspiracy.
Bill Jones
What will kill the Democratic Party is already starting to happen, it’s the drift of the neocons from the corpse of the Republican Party that they killed back to their ancestral home on the left. You have been warned.
LD50
@Brick Oven Bill: You mean the madrassah in Indonesia won’t release his transcripts?
The moron part would explain a lot.
Tax Analyst
BOB – I think you spend way too much time sniffing your own underpants. It’s probably warped all those once-acute perceptive faculties you claim to possess, in which case you should probably stop relying on them.
Of course you will do want you want, but it makes you look like a real ass-hat most of the time.
Brick Oven Bill
Because of the importance of the function of the United States military, and the legitimate questions raised about the poor quality of the electronic document presented with the serial number removed, the responsible thing for the Commander in Chief to do would be to present a physical birth certificate for public review. This would allow military leadership to have confidence that their orders are lawful.
In my opinion, allowing these questions to persist among those in the ranks is irresponsible.
Anton Sirius
@Brick Oven Bill:
So stop raising those questions, BOB.
Why do you hate our troops so much that you would actively try to reduce their confidence and morale?
InflatableCommenter
Shorter Brickhead Oven Bill:
TenguPhule
Only in your head BOB, and similiar hindlegged nutsackers.
oh really
Obviously, the reason Republicans are losing support is because they’ve been apologizing too much. Fortunately, Michael Steele has decided to go all brass knuckles on Obama and the “Democrat” Party. That will undoubtedly reverse the trend and return them to their status as the permanent majority party.
I guess not knowing an adjective from a noun is as good a way as any to connect with the American people.
Wile E. Quixote
@Brick Oven Bill
BOB, if you’re not a racist child molester whose backyard brick oven has been used to cremate his countless victims would you please release the proof of this?
tofubo
what will be the most fun about the next couple of days is watching Republicans try to deny or ignore these findings…
that means that they will be brought up on the meadea in the next couple of days, here your logic fails….
Little Dreamer
@Micheline:
Yeah, you keep hanging on to that rope and don’t let it get wrapped around you too tightly.
Hahaha!
Little Dreamer
@Bill Belichick:
Blue laws would not change people’s perspective, only anger them more and cement a larger Democratic advantage in the end.
bob
Lets just run the percentages, shall we:
College Grad: -21%
18 to 29: -22%
Midwest: -20%
< $30k: -24%
$30k – $75k: -19%
Moderate: -24%
Non-churchgoers: -47%
Unmarried: -21%
Male: -16%
$75k +: -13%
50 to 64: -14%
East: -13%
South: -9%
College Non-Grad: -7%
Black: -17%
Non-White: -4%
65 plus: -2%
Conservative: -2%
Church-goers: ±0%
superdestroyer
So the next question is how will politics function in the coming one party state. Look at how the media is barely paying attention to the Democratic primary for governor in Virginia even though the winner will certainly be the next governor.
How will Congressional election be affected when more than half of Congress is from the the same party and will be running for re-election unopposed.
And last, how will the next relevant election for President be affect when the real election to replace President Obama will occur in the Democratic primary and caucuses between the Iowa Caucuses and Super Tuesday.
In 2016, if the same person wins the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, President Obama’s replaced will have been selected by two states.