Although they’re not quite yet on the endangered species list, the dwindling number of Americans who self-identify as “Republican” must have the GOP’s top political strategists laying awake at night. They’re the smart guys and gals who are really the ones in charge of “the stupid party.”
Talk about a fuckin’ thankless task! Can you imagine?
According to Think Progress, the rolling average of GOP party identification prepared by The Pollster.com shows Republicans at 22% of the American public, a percentage that has been declining steadily for several years as the party caters more and more to its fringiest members, who are increasingly looking like its only members! Their problem with broadening the party’s appeal goes far beyond a “Catch 22%” as an apparent civil war among the GOP’s constituent parts is coming to a nasty boil. Damned if they do, damned it they don’t, should the GOP decide to join this century, they’d lose the remainder of their old guard voters.
Pew Research Center has it looking even worse for the GOP, down to only 19% of Americans! If this is accurate, then what percentage of these folks would live north of the Mason-Dixon line? It can’t be that many anymore. And Republican voters aren’t merely primarily located in southern states, they’d also, in the main, be some pretty long in the tooth southerners.
Senior fellow at both the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, Think Progress blogger Ruy Teixeira writes that the Republicans’ lockstep intransigence to the Affordable Healthcare Act, while offering nothing better—nothing at all—to replace it, is being seen as just a big “fuck you” to the folks that will be covered now.
Maybe they’re placing their bets on the wrong horse, especially when it comes to Obamacare. Start with the fact that roughly a third of the opposition to Obamacare stems from the view that the program isn’t liberal enough rather than too liberal. That doesn’t fit with the GOP’s blow-it-up paradigm. Nor do recent polls that show an average of only 35 percent saying they want to repeal Obamacare as opposed to keeping it as is or with changes.
That’s not an insignificant point: I have had pollsters call me on three separate occasions over the past four years to ask about my attitude towards the healthcare law and I was not once given the option of saying “I’m not much of a supporter of the ACA because it’s not liberal enough” or to in any way indicate that I thought the expansion of Medicare for all would be a better way to go. I was only offered a “yay or nay,” vote it up or down choice. From the tone of the questioning, I’m pretty darned sure that each of these polls were paid for by conservative groups. It seemed odd that they were conducting polls, not to find out scientifically what the public really thinks, but to instead get them to confirm or imply agreement—even if nothing of the sort was intended—by deliberately proscribing the parameters of the debate to twist statistical arms.
The point being that MY opinion—I’m a staunch socialist—was being tallied as an “I’m agin’ it!” vote and used to confirm some delusional Republican bias. That’s simply ridiculous.
Apparently equating better access to healthcare with Hitler has been a bit of a bust for the GOP. A recent Hart Research/SEIU poll on voter attitudes toward Obamacare vis a vis the 2014 races found that:
Voters feel intensely negative toward Republican candidates who have worked to repeal or undermine the law, especially those who are unwilling to help their constituents take advantage of the benefits and protections available to them under the ACA….Seventy-one percent of voters express unfavorable feelings toward “a Republican who, as an elected official, refuses to help individuals and small businesses understand how best to deal with Obamacare and take advantage of its benefits.”….Two-thirds of all voters (including 60% of undecided voters) have an unfavorable impression of “a Republican who repeatedly voted to cut the funding needed to effectively implement the law, and refuses to provide information to employers and individuals about it.”
“Intensely negative” doesn’t really beat around the bush, but you know, they’re assholes, pure and simple! It’s always been a puzzle to me why it practically takes an electric cattle prod to get most Democrats and non-Republican leaning independents to actually vote, despite the clear-cut shit sandwich alternative if they fail to make that tiny, tiny civic effort. I’m looking at YOU lazy-ass North Carolinians who didn’t even bother to vote last year. Look what it got you, especially those of you who just got your jobless benefits cut.
If you could do it all over again, would you do anything differently?
More from the Hart survey summation:
Our generic congressional trial heat shows a relatively narrow, three-point advantage for Democratic candidates (44%) over Republicans (41%) nationwide. However, when the choice in the 2014 election is presented as “a Democrat who favors fixing and improving Obamacare rather than repealing it altogether” versus “a Republican who wants to totally repeal Obamacare,” voters favor the Democratic candidate (51%) over the Republican candidate (36%) by 15 percentage points.
The biggest problem the Republicans have is… themselves. Almost everyone hates ‘em, so why not double down on everything they hate the most?
And if you happened to catch any of the news coverage of this weekend’s anniversary of the March on Washington, exactly what sort of snake the GOP has stepped on by trying to curb voter rights for African-Americans is becoming pretty apparent, isn’t it?
Don’t ever change GOP!