Evening Open Thread

Filed in National by on September 21, 2009

With a chart of the day:

Steve Benen of the Political Animal blog put this chart together with the results of last weeks Research 2000 weekly poll. A commenter on his blog said the following:

[The Republican Party] is only barely a regional party if only 50% of the [South], who are supposed to be its “base,” have a favorable view of it.

Sadly, Democrats in Congress and the White House seem to be totally unaware of how unpopular the Republicans are and allow them to control the message and the direction of the conversation.

Where did the backbone go? I thought 2008 was about FINALLY growing a spine, but they seem to have reverted to the cowardice of the late 1990s.

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  1. cassandra_m says:
    September 21, 2009 at 10:45 pm

    Joshua Tucker of The Monkey Cage talked about this chart today:

    […]While I am not surprised that the Republican party is more popular in the South than other regions, the starkness of this distinction is beyond what I had expected. Moreover, while I would have expected the Republican party to be unpopular in the Northeast, I did not expect such similar numbers from the West and Midwest. Quite seriously, if I saw this type of regional distribution of support for a political party in a country like Slovakia, I would assume the party represented an ethnic minority.[…]

    The whole post is interesting, suggesting that the data from this poll seem to indicate the the South is such a strong outlier that perhaps all of the polling numbers should be reported as The South and Everywhere Else.

  2. Unstable Isotope says:
    September 21, 2009 at 11:26 pm

    You are just chart-tastic tonight, DD. I find this chart very surprising. Our national conversation is really being controlled by a regional fringe group. Can we have at least one cable channel that covers the other 3/4 of the country? It could also explain why the Republicans think they are so ascendant – they are surrounded by other Republicans.

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