Tag: Republican Party

Voters Appear Set to Hand Control of Congress to the Party They Like Least

Jon Ponder
House Speaker Boehner, left, and prospective Senate Majority Leader McConnell
House Speaker Boehner, left, has a 28% favorable rating; prospective Senate Majority Leader McConnell’s is 25%, according to GOP-leaning Rasmussen

With the midterm elections less than a month away, polling suggests that voters will give the Republican Party majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since 2006, when they booted GOP out of power after its disastrous six year run as George W. Bush’s “Rubberstamp Congress.”

The NBC poll found that while 59 percent of Republicans say they’re engaged in the election, just 47 percent of Democrats are paying attention

FiveThirtyEight gives Republicans a 60 percent chance of taking the Senate, and, largely because of Republican gerrymandering in 2011, there is little chance Democrats will take back the House. To keep their majority in the Senate, Democrats need to hold and/or win six seats, including five current seats in red and purple states — Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina and New Hampshire — and one blue state that looks wobbly, Colorado. They are likely to hold the open seat in Michigan, the race for the open seat in Georgia is considered winnable, and — if they’re having a good night — upsets are possible in Kansas and South Dakota.

How likely is that Democrats will have a good night on Nov. 4? An NBC poll this week found that likely voters favor a Republican-led Congress by two points, 46/44 percent, while the larger cohort of registered voters prefer to put Dems in charge by the same margin, 46/42 percent. The preference for Democratic-control by registered voters ought to be encouraging — the Dems have put time and money into getting out the vote in critical states — but NBC also found that while 59 percent of Republicans say they’re engaged in the election, just 47 percent of Democrats are paying attention.

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Voters Evenly Split Over Whether They Would Vote for a Democrat or Republican in Their Congressional District

Buck Banks

39% to 39%

Voters are evenly divided on whether they would vote for a Democrat or a Republican in their congressional district, a new Quinnipiac poll finds. Democrats held a nine-point edge in early October. Voters still disapprove of Republicans in Congress, 73% to 20%, more than they disapprove of Democrats, 62% to 30%.

Obamacare Is More Popular Than the Republican Party – By 14 Points

Jon Ponder

The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll released yesterday had nothing but bad news for Republicans. For starters, their 24 percent favorable rating is the lowest ever recorded in the poll.

Sure, it could be an outlier, except that just 24 hours earlier Gallup released a poll that also found Republicans with the lowest favorability it had ever recorded. The GOP’s 28 percent favorability was 3 percentage points lower the previous lowest point ever recorded by Gallup — the 31 percent approval Republicans received in 1999 after their bogus impeachment of Pres. Clinton.

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California GOP Voter Registration Drops Below 30%

Jon Ponder

28.9%

Share of Californians who are registered as Republicans as of February 2013, compared with 43.9% registered as Democrats and 20.9% as independents, according to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. Since 2003, the share of registered Dems has remained steady and the percentage of independents has risen from 15.3%, but the percentage of registered Republicans has dropped 6.3 percentage points from 35.2%. As a result, there are 100,000 fewer registered Republicans in the state now than there were a decade ago, despite the fact that California’s population has grown by 2.9 million.

Fact Checking GOP Propaganda in North Carolina

Jon Ponder

Rob Christensen at the Raleigh News & Observer fact checks 10 key planks in the North Carolina Republican Party’s propaganda platform:

Myth No. 1: North Carolina’s public schools are failing its children.

North Carolina fourth and eighth graders performed better than the U.S. national average, according to the 2011 Trends in International Mathematic and Science Study. They out-scored students in Australia, Israel, Sweden, Italy and Norway.

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Voters Abandoning California Republican Party – Independents Now Trail GOP Registrations By Just 8.9 Points

Jon Ponder

New voter registration tallies from the California Secretary of State’s office show that Republican Party is continuing to shed voters. Analysts say that teavangelical hardline opposition on social issues and tax policy in Washington and nationwide is driving voters out of the GOP column in the nation’s largest state.

“In California, the Republican Party has done tremendous damage to its brand with its positions on immigration and gay marriage. Add to that the no-tax pledge.”
— Matt David, California Republican strategist

In 1996, 37 percent of California registered voters were Republicans. In 2007, the number had dropped to 30.9 percent, or 5.3 million voters. The latest figures show a decline this year — despite a GOP pre-primary registration drive by Ron Paul supporters — to 30.2 percent, or 5,180,417 registered Republicans.

In 1972, just 5 percent of Californians were registered independents. By 1996, the number of independents had doubled to 10.7 percent. In 2007, it rose to 18.8 percent, or 2.9 million voters. Last year, fully one-fifth of California voters — 20.4 percent, or 3.5 million voters — had registered as independents. This year the percentage rose again to 21.3 percent, or 3.7 million.

The gap between registered Republicans and independents is already in single digits — 8.9 percent points now — and the trendline suggests it is narrowing.

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GOP 2010 Campaign ‘Pledge to America’ Broken: ‘We Will Fight Efforts to Use a National Crisis for Political Gain’

Jon Ponder

screen-gop-pledge-to-americaBy threatening to crash the U.S. economy if they do not get their way in negotiations on economic policy, House Republicans, led by their tea party cohort, have rightly been accused of holding the economy hostage.

Only time will tell if this completely made-up crisis, with its dire ramifications for the financial well-being of every American family, is, as it appears to be, a classic Republican overreach. But two things are certain now: They created this debt ceiling “crisis” solely for the purpose of extorting the Senate and administration into enacting laws that benefit the Republicans’ wealthy corporate sponsors to the detriment of the middle class and wage earners.

And, by creating a national crisis for no other purpose than political gain, they have rendered quaint a key promise they made to independent voters in their 2010 campaign “Pledge to America.”

David Weigel revisited the House GOP’s campaign Pledge yesterday and found this gem:

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Is Skynet Behind the Schwarzenegger-Shriver Split?

Jon Ponder

Shriver and Schwarzenegger in better days
Shriver and Schwarzenegger in better days
Why would Skynet build an android that has the physical characteristics of its earlier Terminator model, but now with the appearance of a man in his 60s, replete with cosmetic surgery to its face and orange hair plugs?

The answer, of course, is that, even in the vivid imagineering of science-fiction, it strains credulity to believe Skynet, an evil artificial intelligent system that becomes self-aware, revolts against its human creators and mass produces machines whose sole purpose is to wipe out humankind and take over the world, would build a robot that looks the way former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger does now.

As silly as this is, it may explain at least part of the reasons for the newly announced separation between Schwarzenegger, who played the android (or its replica) in the first three installments of the “Terminator” franchise, and his wife, former NBC anchor Maria Shriver.

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Post-Convention Wrap-Up: California GOP Said to Be on the Verge of Extinction

Jon Ponder

GOP Fate? A mammoth faces instinction in the La Brea Tar Pits
GOP Fate? A mammoth faces instinction in the La Brea Tar Pits
“Like a herd of wooly mammoths at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, the California Republican Party is on the verge of extinction,” writes CalBuzz, one of the best and most irreverent political websites in the Golden State.

That assessment came after CalBuzz spent the weekend covering the state GOP’s biannual convention.

A former Republican leader agreed. “It’s on life support,” he said.

But why is the California GOP in decline at the same time that the tea party has invigorated the the party just about everywhere else? CalBuzz suggests that the root of the party’s problem is its self-delusion — they think their candidates have not been conservative enough — as well as their dim view of, well, people:

The prevailing attitude at the convention seemed to be the Republicans lost every major statewide race and have been reduced to a strident minority because Republican candidates were too weak on conservative principles and besides, people are lazy and stupid.

The convention was notable for a couple of things that did not happen:

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Andrew Sullivan: The Dickishness of the GOP

Jon Ponder

Former Republican sympathizer, Andrew Sullivan:

What we’ve observed these past two years is a political party that knows nothing but scorched earth tactics, cannot begin to see any merits in the other party’s arguments, refuses to compromise one inch on anything, and has sought from the very beginning to do nothing but destroy the Obama presidency.

These people are not conservatives in this core civilized sense; they are partisan vandals.

I see no other coherent message or strategy since 2008. Just opposition to everything, zero support for a president grappling with a recession their own party did much to precipitate, and facing a fiscal crisis the GOP alone made far worse with their spending in the Bush-Cheney years. There is not a scintilla of responsibility for their past; not a sliver of good will for a duly elected president. Worse, figures like Cantor and McCain actively seek to back foreign governments against the duly elected president of their own country, and seek to repeal the signature policy achievement of Obama’s first two years, universal health care.

I know it is the opposition’s role to oppose. But the sheer scale and absolutism of the opposition, and its continuation in the lame duck session, even over such small but integral reforms such as the new START and DADT repeal, is remarkable… These people are not conservatives in this core civilized sense; they are partisan vandals.

And if the GOP blocks the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, despite the careful Pentagon study, a slow roll-out of its provisions, and support from the Joint Chiefs chairman and the defense secretary, then we will find out something else. The contempt the GOP has for gay lives, gay citizens and those who wear the uniform of the United States is as deep and as vile as we ever thought it was.

Yes, I’m angry at this general nihilist partisanship, and wounded once more by these people’s profound, obsessive homophobia. But I cannot, alas, say I am surprised. The degeneracy has been building for a long time. It is just the stench of it right now that overwhelms the nostrils. [Emphasis added.]