Over at fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver posted a great diary today looking at the crosstabs of the Daily Kos / Research 2000 poll of Republican identifiers:
McGOP: The Virtues and Vices of Sameness
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/...
Although non-white Republicans show some variation in their responses regarding Palin, immigration amnesty, and whether Obama is a racist, the various breakdowns of the polling results show remarkable unaniminty. I haven't seen another diary on this here and thought this is worth heightened attention.
Silver treats this sameness as having both strengths and weaknesses:
"The strength is that they can somewhat comfortably adopt a nationalized, one-size-fits-all message. They don't have to worry about the constellation of constituencies that Democrats have: labor voters, Baby-boomer liberals, blacks, Hispanics, college-educated technocrats, libertarianish younger voters, etc. Their base is the same pretty much everywhere, and actuating a strategy that appeals to that base is not challenging.
"The liability, meanwhile, is that while the Republican base might be the same pretty much everywhere, the rest of the electorate isn't. Some states and districts have different ratios of Republicans to Democratic and independent voters. Moreover, they have different types of Democratic and independent voters, some of whom may be amenable to the Republican message and others of whom won't be.
"Thus, the Republicans are more likely to make suboptimal electoral decisions in individual districts..."
Per usual, I don't have much to add to Silver, but two thoughts jump to mind:
- The potential for systemic failure — like the financial markets when they were based on increasing home values, this sets up McGOP for catastrophic failure. We really have to hope for some of that by November, particularly as it affects Senate races.
- Do they believe what they say they believe? — I've wanted to diary about this for the longest but haven't been able to find a hook to hang it on. I can believe that this cult of programmable citizen voters is now passively having 'original' ideas that are fed to them, believing because of the lockstep and emotions that, "Yeah, that's what I believe." But I don't see this type of turn-on-a-dime consensus as consonant with real people really believing things. Maybe someone else here can express it more clearly and have better insights, but there is something defective about the subjectivity that is showing up in the polls. It has to be highly artificial and many Republicans must have conflicted feelings about being part of McGOP.