Republican war on empathy, Sotomayor edition

As I've noted here and here and here and in several other pieces I'm too lazy to dig up, the GOP's hostility toward empathy, now fully out in the open, is electoral poison. There's a reason Bush and Rove concocted their "compassionate conservatism" fiction -- to make their party seem more warm and fuzzy to swing voters. Now, they're not even pretending. And look how that value polls:

Do you think empathy is an important characteristic for a Supreme Court Justice to possess or not?

        Yes   No
18-29    63   17
30-44    47   34
45-59    55   26
60+      46   35

White    41   39
Black    81    4
Latino   79    4
Other    79    5

Men      48   34
Women    56   24

Dem      73   12
GOP      18   56
Ind      54   28

There's a reason the Democratic Party is the party of ethnic and racial minorities, women, and youth. They all think empathy is a good thing. Even whites are evenly split. Now look at the geographic breakdown, from the same question above:

Northeast 63   18
South     41   42
Midwest   55   25
West      53   27

That's the danger of being a rump regional party -- you lose touch with the rest of America. If half of southerners want an indifferent and callous government, that's their prerogative of course. But when the rest of America disagrees, it makes for a nationally unelectable Republican Party.

Republicans at the Sotomayor hearings think they are scoring political points. And they are -- for Democrats.