GOP vs Mainstream America: DKos Poll Pulls the Mask off the Village Idiots

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:



GOP vs Mainstream America: DKos Poll Pulls the Mask off the Village Idiots
By Sara Robinson

February 4, 2010 - 2:34pm ET


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A village cannot revise village life to suit the village idiot. -- Frank Schaeffer

On Tuesday, the Daily Kos published a new Research 2000 study showing the current state of belief in the GOP. Though the results aren't anything new -- indeed, the study just puts hard numbers to everything we already thought we knew about the right wing -- the data also show, in sharp detail, just how far to the right the GOP has been dragged by its right wing...and how far out of step they are with the rest of America as a result.

The data also show that Frank Schaeffer was more than fair in characterizing these people as America's "village idiots." For one thing, they really are a bitterly small minority. Last week, I laid out some numbers of my own, which showed that the conservative movement as it's currently constituted only represents the views of about 25 to 30 percent of Americans. (And, historically, that's about as big as conservative movements ever get in the US -- though it's plenty big enough to do some real damage.) Furthermore, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll done last October, only about 20 percent of Americans currently identify as Republican, which is a 40-year low. There's nothing about our current GOP that can be supportably described as "mainstream."

Kos's pollsters did a valiant job of getting inside the heads of this 20 percent. But the story they tell also shows how severe their derangement has become; and just how little introspection the conservatives have done to reckon with the causes and consequences of their own failures. And it also documents the vast chasm this willful refusal to deal with reality is creating between this noisy minority and the vast majority of Americans.

To grasp the size of the gap, you only have to compare Kos' numbers on conservative beliefs with the most current available stats on the attitudes of the country as a whole. So -- that's what I did below. This discussion doesn't address all of the the questions in Kos's summary, because good data wasn't available on some of them; but a look at most of the high points gives you an accurate picture of just how far out of the mainstream the GOP has flown. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010020504/gop-vs-m...

[billybob537]

1. Kos's pollsters did a valiant job of getting inside the heads of this 20 percent

I hope they're not scarred for life.

[3waygeek]

3. Getting inside their heads is easy...

finding anything once you get inside is another story.

[malaise]

2. Yes and then Tancredo's comments and the support for them

among the teabagger loonies reinforced the results of the poll.


Excellent article.

Rec