The GOP isn't half the country now, don't act like they are

Great Debates
1

I propose that the people of the USA acknowledge that the Grand Old Party is a minority party now. Not the opposition. Just the right-wing third. So, in contexts like Sunday morning talk shows, let’s not weight arguments as if the GOP were the opposition & half the country.

The country breaks down more like this:

One-third left/progressive/green. The Russ Feingold wing of the Dems.
One-third center/moderate/establishment. The Clintons, Obama, & the “moderate GOP” that are fleeing to the Democratic Party.
One-third right/reactionary/conservative. The GOP as it is now.

The Democrats are in power because they embrace the first two third in most places. I would like to see an acknowledgement of this fact.

2

Even more, I would like to see the news media give equal time to the 1/3 of the country in the left wing instead of treating the center like it’s the left and the actual left like they’re marginal freaks way out on the fringe.

3

Yes. That.

4

Nonsense, you two - the moderates and the left both benefit from being lumped together, demographic-wise. If you separate them out you get three equal parties, or worse, the GOP successfully courts the moderates (given that it’s a two-party system) - whereas if you lump the left and the middle together you will win elections.

When the GOP is really marginalized, as in the left doesn’t need the moderates to win, then it will be time to start drawing lines between the left and the middle. Not before.

5

I noticed a lot of marginalization of the left recently. But that’s as it should be the left is pretty wacky. Most of the time I just hear incomprehensible mush about how we need some sort of grand change because the system is corrupt and broken, and blah blah blah incoherent nonsense. We need a revolution man!

The fringes on both sides should be marginalized always.

6

OK, put it this way:

Far left: the system is broken, man, what we need is anarcho-syndicalism

Left: the system can work for us without that much change; we need to stop listening to Reaganite “anti-government” lines & work on public services. (Like, say, massive increase in publicly funded hospitals, which would make us merely Conservatives in the UK.)

Moderate Left: Yeah, sure, what he said, where’s my kickback?

The Present Center? The present establishment, anyway: Whatever you do, do it gradually, & get all the stakeholders in the room. (The Clinton/Obama theory.)

Moderate Right: Um, who is that? Richard Lugar? Jim Webb? Pretty much the same as the last one, innit?

Reaganites: Get out the vote by promising to do nothing, spout Reaganite “anti-government” lines while increasing federal spending (hypocrites), yadda yadda.

Serious Reaganites: Tilt at windmills as if you’re ever going to cut spending. Flake, Coburn, I’m looking at you.

Far Right: the system is broken! What we need is Libertarianism, & Ron Paul in the White House, and the Fair Tax!

7

This from Gallup:

“Conservatives” Are Single-Largest Ideological Group"

"Thus far in 2009, 40% of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal."

"While a solid majority of Republicans are on the same page – 73% call themselves conservative – Democrats are more of a mixture. The major division among Democrats is between self-defined moderates (40%) and liberals (38%). However, an additional 22% of Democrats consider themselves conservative, much higher than the 3% of Republicans identifying as liberal."

“Gallup trends show a slight increase since 2008 in the percentages of all three party groups calling themselves "conservative,” which accounts for the three percentage-point increase among the public at large."

"As reported last week on Gallup.com, women are more likely than men to be Democratic in their political orientation. Along the same lines, women are more likely than men to be ideologically “moderate” and “liberal,” and less likely to be “conservative.”

Still, conservatism outweighs liberalism among both genders."

[bolding mine]

Link

Now, while it’s true that ‘conservative’ doesn’t necessarily equal ‘Republican’, the fact remains that most Americans with a preference prefer conservatism. Consider that despite the Iraq war, the economy, daily hammering of the Republican Bush administration by the media, and the media’s virtual annointment of Obama as the nation’s savior, Obama still won the election by only eight percentage points. Eight percentage points! Only eight more voters out of a hundred voted for Obama, and more than a few of those were actually conservatives, but conservatives who had grown disenchanted with the direction the GOP had taken.

So you and eluicdator (another poster mistakenly believing that liberals have won) are not only premature in your gloating over the demise of conservatism and Republicanism in this country, you are flat-out wrong!

But I mean that in the nicest way. :wink:

8

The repubs are a solid 25 percent. Every stupid thing Bush did was approved by 25 percent. The crash was OK to the same 25 %. Every Obama move is hated by the same unthinking, selfish ,unAmerican 25 %. This is not new. They are trying to reach out now. But they have nothing to offer. Less taxes, less governmental supervision , and more money for the rich is not a very progressive platform.
They knew who they represented. Their mission was to attract single issue voters. They pretended to care about, gun rights, gay marriage, family values and religion. They suckered people into voting against their financial security. It worked over and over.

9

And since this started as a question about parties, it’s my understanding that non-affiliated voters are now the biggest group, with Democrats and Republicans trailing that.

10

It seems like bollocks to me. The moderates may generally have flocked to one banner now, but that doesn’t mean they won’t go to the other. Only the diehards can really be counted on. And, irregardless of that, of course the GOP should be treated as the “opposition” - wait until the Greens or someone have a following as large as one of the big two, and then you can start talking about how they’re a minority.

On the other hand, I don’t believe this is necessarily an accurate state of affairs. “Liberal” is still more controversial term than “conservative” (and certainly more than “moderate” over there, so I can easily see a lot of people preferring not to declare themselves as such.

11

Of course someone may call themselves M/C/L, doesn’t mean that they actually are.

12

This. Plenty of Democratic positions enjoy 60 or 70+% support, even among those who call themselves conservatives.

Virtually your entire first sentence is wrong, and 8% is historically a pretty good victory margin. Also, are you going to claim again that Bush was resoundingly reelected?

13

This is exactly correct. The Republicans got kicked out because they never had the support of liberals, and they lost the support of a lot of conservatives because of their liberal policies (No Child Left Behind, Prescription Drug Benefit, etc) and because they turned out to be corrupt yokels. And also, because they happened to be the party in power when the economy cratered, and took the lion’s share of the blame.

It also helps that the media was totally in the tank for Obama and the debate was completely skewed in his direction.

Some other interesting polls:

Only 17% Rate Government A Wiser Spender Than Private Business

Three-out-of-four Americans (74%) trust their own judgment more than that of the average member of Congress when it comes to economic issues facing the nation.

Only 30% of Americans think the stimulus has helped the economy.

Only 37% think the country is on the right track

76% of Americans think the government will waste the stimulus money.

47% of Americans think more financial regulation is a bad idea. Only 33% thinks it’s a good idea.

A majority of Americans think government spending hurts the economy. Only 27% think it helps.

Just 21% Favor GM Bailout Plan, 67% Oppose

In poll after poll, the results turn more conservative the more specific you get. Obama wasn’t elected because his was a liberal - he was elected because he and his followers claimed over and over again that he wasn’t a liberal, and a non-skeptical media let him get away with it. And now we’re supposed to believe that his election is some sort of referendum on the correctness of liberalism?

If Obama had said, “Elect me, and I’ll quadruple the deficit, nationalize General Motors, put a United Auto Workers executive on the board of Chrysler, raise excise taxes, create a 4 trillion dollar public healthcare program, and implement a 60 billion dollar a year tax on fossil fuels” he would have lost to McCain in a landslide.

What he actually campaigned on was not raising taxes on 95% of Americans, a net spending DECREASE for the federal budget, pay-as-you-go rules for spending which would end chronic deficits, an end to racial divisiveness, and conservative-sounding rhetoric on education and faith-based values.

His ratings are still high, but coming down to earth. And his negatives are rising and are now higher than his approval ratings. But the Democrats have created a minefield by passing so many unpopular policies. You better hope that they all work out splendidly, because if they don’t the Democrats are setting the stage for the Republicans to come roaring back in 2010 and 2012, and then we’ll hear lots of hand-wringing commentary about how liberalism is dead.

The same thing happened when Clinton was elected. Despite the fact that he was elected in part because of his conservative rhetoric (“The era of big government is over”), once in power the liberals saw this as a mandate to implement a broad array of liberal policies. So you got HillaryCare, an attempt to reform the policy towards gays in the military, and some very liberal cabinet appointments. The result was a disaster for the Democrats, and two years after gloating about how Republicans were a dead party, the Democrats were swept out of power by the Republicans and Clinton wound up with Republican-driven welfare reform as his signature accomplishment.

History sure does like to repeat itself.

14

I noted in another thread here a poll this week that found that minorities, at least in the Los Angeles area, are more likely than whites to label themselves conservatives. But many steer clear of the GOP because of what they perceive as race baiting and pandering to the lowest common denominator.
In other words, many blacks and Hispanics don’t vote Democrat necessarily because of the party’s stance on issues like gun control, abortion, or even their ideology about the role of government. They vote Democrat because they see the Republican party as hostile to the point of batshit craziness.

15

Exactly. As long as the GOP remains known as the party of white racists, it doesn’t matter how many people with conservative beliefs are among minorities; the great majority simply aren’t going to vote for their enemies, and that’s what the GOP is. If the GOP collapsed and some new conservative party not identified with the GOP’s racism rose up, that would be another matter; but there’s no reason to think that’s likely to happen soon.

16

Um, isn’t the opposition always the minority, at least for awhile?

If they weren’t the minority, then they wouldn’t have lost the election and gone into opposition. That’s sort of what that means, right?

When did Barack Obama deny being a liberal? Specific cites, please.

17

Watching them implode right now is entertaining enough.

18

The problem the OP has is the acknowledgement of such.

I posted today in a GQ thread how Walter Wagner, an anti-Large Hadron Collider science teacher, posited that there is a 50% chance that the LHC will kill us all somehow. Why does he think that? Because you have a possibility of something either happening or not happening. Two outcomes, therefore it’s a 1 in 2 chance.

Similar thinking guides much of the news cycle these days. There are the Republicans and the Democrats, therefore the two sides are treated as holding a 50/50 share, each equally powerful. You also see it in things like Intelligent Design; folks will argue with a straight face that since there’s two theories, evolution and ID, they automatically have equal weight and need to be given equal time in the classroom. It’s lazy and ignores reality.

19

Indeed, I know many people who most GOP would call “Liberal” who call themselves “moderate.”

20

Okay, his followers then. But Obama clearly took a stance that wasn’t as liberal as his policies are now. He did say that under his administration there would be a net decrease in federal spending, and that his environmental plan would be revenue neutral. He also claimed categorically that he would not raise taxes on 95% of the population, and he campaigned against Bush’s deficits and promised pay-as-you-go as the philosophy of his administration.

Anyway, the point I was getting at is that, although Obama himself still has a 58% approval rating, almost none of his policies poll that high, and in fact most are opposed by a majority of Americans. My assumption is that his poll numbers are still high because the negative effects of these policies have yet to be felt, and because people like him as a person and are giving him the benefit of the doubt. He’s still enjoying a honeymoon.

But the Democrats need to have these policies work. If, in a year from now, General Motors is bleeding public money and on its nth cash injection, unemployment is above 10%, the deficit is higher than the Obama administration’s projections, and data shows that cap and trade is costing jobs, they’re going to pay the price, because these policies never had the support of the public at large. And since Republicans almost universally opposed them, the Democrats own it.