Apparently plenty damaged! This gorgeous graph shows a public largely deaf to the Republican message, except for the crazies, the birthers, the religious fanatics and the tea baggers. How do you recover from numbers like these? By next year? No way! I mean, not even a guy as oblivious to FACTS as Sean Hannity could spin this one positively! The Republican party has all but been abandoned except for the lunatic fringe!
There were many, many times during this, our Summer of Discontent when I despaired of seeing any substantive change in this country because of the loud-mouthed turnips at the town hall meetings egged on by the likes of Glenn Beck and his FOX News buddies, waving teabags and clogging up the television airways with stupidity on a nightly basis. But I kept my sanity by coming back to the incontrovertible fact that the Republicans have been basically out-flanked by population trends and the demographic zeitgeist is decidedly not with them moving forward.
It’s a toxic brand and it’s burning itself out with the hate and ignorance. Smart people do not want to hang around with idiots. And minorities are not welcome and never have been (as if). Forty-somethings who cast their first vote for Reagan don’t want to be associated with these fools they have nothing in common with. It’s embarrassing to be Republican! The GOP’s adherents with brains mutinied a long time ago to the Libertarian Party, or became independents or even Democrats. The only ones sticking around are the low IQ buffoons with misspelled signs we see on FOX News shouting “ACORN!” and other nonsense. Most of them are old and when they die off, they’re gone. Keep that in mind when you see these sad, nutty, angry idiots on TV next time. These people won’t be around forever. And when they’re gone, they will not be replaced.
And that is just the way it is. Nature is quite kind in that regard.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, progressive friends: No political party is immune from having a life-cycle and we’re about to see the end of the GOP’s. Good riddance, I say, I will piss on its grave.
Here’s an excerpt from a slightly less heated discussion about the above graph from Pollster:
The overall finding is simple—the GOP’s standing relative to the Democrats on both measures is worse than any opposition party in the sample. For instance, the Pew data show that the Republicans are currently viewed more negatively than any minority party in the previous four midterms in terms of both net favorables and the difference in net favorables between parties
The CBS results (not shown) are even more dramatic. In June, when the question was most recently asked, Republican net favorables were -30% and Democratic net favorables were 25%, which swamps the comparable results from the previous cycles.
In short, there’s no question that the GOP party brand is in worse shape than any opposition party in recent memory.