1 Boring Old Man

GOP Losses Span Nearly All Demographic Groups
Only frequent churchgoers show no decline in support since 2001
by Jeffrey M. Jones

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Implications

The Republican Party clearly has lost a lot of support since 2001, the first year of George W. Bush’s administration. Most of the loss in support actually occurred beginning in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina and Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court – both of which created major public relations problems for the administration – and amid declining support for the Iraq war. By the end of 2008, the party had its worst positioning against the Democrats in nearly two decades.

The GOP may have stemmed those losses for now, as it does not appear to have lost any more support since Obama took office. But as the analysis presented here shows, the losses the GOP has suffered have come among nearly all demographic groups apart from some of the most ardent Republican subgroups.

A few people were removed "for cause" – too biased to even consider. Then there were peremptory challenges that sent some of the rest of us packing. The jury was then the "leftovers." In my three trips through this process, I was always an early casualty in the peremptory challenges. Not that I wanted to hang around the courtroom for weeks on a jury, but I’ll admit that my early demise stuck with me for a while, and I finally asked a litigator friend what it was that made me such a jury pariah. After he stopped laughing [which took a while, I might add], he told me that I was an "expert." "Experts of any kind are dangerous," he said. "You see experts are used to being experts, and think they are experts on everything. If you get one of those on a jury and they side against you, your goose is cooked." I guess it’s a compliment to be considered an "expert," but I had the nagging feeling that he was telling me that people like me are "know-it-alls." I’d like to argue with that, but here I am, a retired psychiatrist, writing a political blog, so I suppose he was right enough. Mea Culpa…

This remained an odd way of doing things in my mind. How did such a process evolve? I don’t know the answer to that, but I now think it’s pretty ingenious — in fact it’s downright brilliant. And, I’m learning, it’s consistent with the way the political mind actually works. In the interpretation of the Gallup Poll above, there’s a good example. After documenting the miserable state of the Republican Party, there’s the section on Implications. They list three things: Bush’s nomination of an obviously unqualified friend to the Supreme Court; his incompetent and inadequate response to the Hurricane destruction of a great American city; and his persistence in pursuing a doomed and ill-conceived war. That seems right to me, but if you think about it, it’s odd. Those are indictments of George W. Bush, not the ideology, Conservatism, and not the organization, the Republican Party.

We do a lot of our politics in the negative, often voting against, rather than for.  At an earlier point in my life, I swore off voting against, having voted for some real losers, because of some outrageous behavior by the people in office. Then I made a related voting mistake I will always regret. I didn’t vote for Al Gore who was well qualified, but I was mad at for certain positions he’d taken [sticking with Clinton when he lied being the main one]. I sure didn’t vote for George W. Bush, but voting wrong by not voting in the 2000 election will haunt me forever. It was a double negative. I liked Clinton’s policies as well as Gore’s, but I got on a moral high horse I wish I’d never mounted. I expect a lot of us rode that high horse and participated in a collective error of unimagined proportions. Mea Culpa redux…

As much as I’d love to see Obama’s election as a mandate from the people, I’m not sure that’s right. And as much as I’d like to see the sorry state of the Republican Party as an indictment, of their beliefs I’m not sure that’s right either. Karl Rove made that mistake in his oft-quoted speech to the New York Conservatives in June 2005 after Bush’s second victory. He described liberalism as headed for extinction. Whoops!

The Republican Party is not dead. It’s only wounded. We didn’t win. The Party in Power was struck "for cause." In the heirarchy of things [Ideology; Hot Buttons like Abortion, Homosexual Marriage, Stem Cell Research; and Job performance] Bush and Cheney flunked big time on Job Performance, but those other things remain. Though I have come to hate the term, the 2008 election was a vote for "Regime Change" as much anything. The Conservative leanings of the country remain strong in the never-ending American struggle to deal with our cultural diversity. Obama’s vision of America remains in the campaign stage rather than a victory. And the Republican Party is not a skeleton on the Botswana plains. It’s a political party severely damaged by the incompetence of George W. Bush and the disturbed mentality and immorality of Richard B. Cheney. So, from my point of view, Cheney is a welcome [though dangerous] player on the media stage. Nothing better than an already struck know-it-all lobbying to get on a jury…