Anonie comments on the new Pew Poll results:
anonie // May 21, 2009 at 9:40 pm
From a comprehensive Pew Research Report released today.
From 2002 to 2009, voters’ partisan identification has moved from virtual parity — 43 percent Republican and 43 percent Democratic at the height of George W. Bush’s popularity in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 — to a massive Democratic advantage today of 53 to 36, a 17 percentage point split, by far the largest difference in the past two decades.
“There is an enormous amount of material about the deterioration of the Republican Party in this survey,” Andy Kohut, who runs the Pew Research Center, told the Huffington Post. The GOP is currently 88 percent non-Hispanic white; it has grown steadily older, from an average of 45.5 years in 2000 to 48.3 years in 2009; it is increasingly dependent on self-identified white evangelicals (35 percent of today’s GOP, on Southerners (39 percent of today’s GOP), and on voters who describe themselves as conservative (66 percent of today’s Republican electorate). Those who espouse conservative views on the family, homosexuality and civil liberties — a population which was in the majority in 1987 — have fallen to the 50 percent level or below, the Pew survey found.
“The Republican Party is facing formidable demographic challenges,” Kohut wrote in a report describing the new Pew findings. “Its constituents are aging and do not reflect the growing ethnic and racial diversity of the general public.
Among poor people, Republican support, already low, has been dropping further, while among the affluent — those with incomes over $100,000, a traditionally Republican segment of the electorate — Democrats have gained parity with the GOP.
While Democrats have made substantial gains in the partisan identification of voters, the party does not have a clear mandate to move to the left across the board, the survey found. Although the Pew findings represent good news for Democrats, there are some costs to their gains. Many of the new Democratic voters are not as liberal as traditional party loyalists, so that support for such initiatives as expanded health care, progressive taxation, and a stronger safety net may face opposition from within party ranks or in party identification at a later date.
On the basic issues of the liberal-conservative divide, the Pew study found a level of polarization “never before seen” between Democrats and Republicans over the fundamental role of government on such questions as whether the government “should help more needy people, even if it means debt,” “guarantee everybody enough to eat and a place to sleep,” and should “care for those who can’t care for selves.” On each of these issues, Pew found, there is more than a 30 percentage point difference in the views of Democrats and Republicans. (and I thought the republicans were the party of moral values.)
So the bottom line is, if you don’t fall completely into the social conservative movement, you’ve left the GOP, even of you are not in complete agreement with the democratic party.
The GOP has become an exclusive club.