New Poll Results Are Proof That Republicans Don't Think

[doeriver]

New Poll Results Are Proof That Republicans Don't Think
By Sara Robinson, Blog for Our Future
Posted on February 5, 2010, Printed on February 6, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145569/new_poll_results_are_proof_that_republicans_don%27t_think?page=entire

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 the conservatives' level of 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...

(more at hyperlink)