Delusional in Dixie?
October 19th, 2009Republican Party On the Outs, Except in the South
Washington conventional wisdom has it that the Republican Party is in big trouble nationally, its brand tarnished, and that support for the GOP is now relegated to support from the least educated people in the country, the most hard core racist conservatives in the Deep South. Now there’s polling data to back that up.
According to a DailyKos Poll, the Republican Party’s favorability rating is very weak in the Northeast, where only 7 percent of the people hold a favorable opinion of the GOP, while an overwhelming 87 hold an unfavorable view.
The party of Lincoln, Reagan and Bush is only faring a tad better in the Midwest, where 13 percent of the people say they have a favorable view of the party while 78 percent say unfavorable. In the West, only 14 percent support the Republicans while 75 percent are skeptical.
In the American South, however, 50 percent of those polled still somehow have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party while 37 percent hold an unfavorable view.
According to Scott Horton of Harper’s magazine:
Does this mean that the party of “no,” now widely associated with tea-baggers, birthers, deathers, and efforts to label Obama simultaneously “fascist” and “socialist,” has scored in the South, while damaging its reputation elsewhere?
According to more data from Middle Tennessee State University, if the people around the South are similar to those in Tennessee, and we suspect they are:
* 34 percent of those polled and 47 percent of those identifying themselves as Republicans are “birthers,” believing that President Barack Obama was born outside of the United States, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
* 30 percent of respondents and 48 percent of Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim, although even Senator John McCain dispelled this myth during the presidential election of 2008.
* 35 percent of Tennesseans and 55 percent of Republicans believe Obama intends to take their Second Amendment rights and their guns away, although the pollsters did not ask about their Fourth Amendment rights against illegal searches and siezures.
* 46 percent of those polled and 71 percent of Republicans believe Obama is a “socialist,” in spite of his attempt to negotiate a health-care plan that compromises with private insurance companies and drug companies.
As for the people of the South, Horton says, “I’d bet that these folks don’t spend much time tracking the news, but if they do, no doubt they’re watching Fox (and listening to Rush Limbaugh, and maybe reading a conservative, chain newspaper). Reading these polls in conjunction suggests that the Republican brand is doing just fine in Dixie, and it’s lined up with some seriously delusional ideas.”
Get to work people. Find out and share the facts…
Comments
Powered by Facebook Comments
Tags: American South, Birthers, Delusional in Dixie, Favorability Rating, Fourth Amendment, Harper's magazine, Public Opinion, Republican Party, Second Amendment
October 19th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Really bad news for the Republicans, especially for the few remaining who are rational and civil. Maybe it is time for the emergence of a new national party to contend with the Democrats.
As I have opined before, it’s probably not going to be the Libetarians, unless by some miracle they get someone like Drew Carey to run for president in 2012.
But, whatever happens, the GOP is Greatly Out of Phase with the country right now and looks to be headed the same way as the Whigs did over a century and a half ago.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Also bad news for the South. If the media and education does not get better, and soon, the region will dig itself into a deep hole politically and become even more isolated from the benefits emanating from the new Washington — and the rest of the country as a whole…
October 20th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
The South has been regionalist before, to its own detriment. Southern Democrats from roughly 1880 to 1970 or so were very unlike their counterparts in the rest of the country on many issues. From 1948 on the alliance began to break down when the Southerners discovered the national party was actually serious about civil rights.
Partisan politics is a bad idea, as Washington opined just over 200 years ago, for many reasons. We have justified it based on supposed greater good coming from it, but in reality, even greater good would come from choosing political leaders based on something other than the competitive sports team model.
That there are winners and losers — and I am talking about entire segments of the population here, not politicians — is in and of itself an indictment of a system which Jefferson and others envisioned producing the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number of people.
The continuing political division into rival teams effectively precludes government doing anything that is truly for the good of all. Now, we use government to do good for whatever team happens to be in charge, and its putative supporters.
One solution would be to fill elected public office in the same way we choose jurors, with the stipulation you get one term and you’re done, forever. Random selection from the entire pool of registered voters is far preferable to what we have now.
And if you like sports, please note they’re still on television. We don’t need our political process to be one.
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:00 am
The future of Democratic leadership in Alabama looks pretty pittiful if Sparks only remedy for the economy is a lottery, and the Black leadership won’t back one of its own.