Poll: GOP base says even its leaders in Congress aren’t extreme enough

According to the latest Rasmussen poll, the GOP base, by a huge majority, is angry at Congressional Republicans. The way the party base sees it, Republicans in Congress have lost touch with the base, they don’t represent their values, and it’s more important to stand for their beliefs than cooperate with Obama. And Rasmussen has been seeing results like this for months.

So the rightwing loons really have taken over the party. Even the congressional Republicans who have been fighting Obama tooth and nail aren’t conservative enough for the party base.

So what does this mean?

It means that the GOP’s congressional leaders cannot take any steps toward accommodation with Obama. Leaders who advocate such action will be pushed aside and replaced by party leaders willing to do what the base wants – obstruct everything Obama does.

This increases the odds that universal health care will require a budget reconciliation process to pass.

The continued GOP obstruction will also anger centrists, who will continue their exodus from the party. Not only could they lose people like Snowe and Collins – it wouldn’t be completely crazy for guys like Charlie Crist to jump ship. Even John Hunstman could be persuaded to defect if he wasn’t deep in enemy territory, in Utah. I said earlier that Pawlenty’s record suggests he wants to stick with the conservatives, but if the GOP slaps him around for not fighting the Franken case hard enough, only Pawlenty’s conservative record would keep him from defecting to the Dems.

The growing mass of centrist ex-Republicans will be prime pickings for Obama, who has already had great success in winning centrists over. Two trends which show up in poll after poll, is that as the GOP shrinks, the number of independents is exploding, and they have leaned heavily toward Obama, both of which are really bad signs for the GOP.

The GOP obstruction of Obama’s legislative program, and continued defections by moderates (or expulsions), will reinforce the loony right’s control of the party, and continue the shrinkage of the party. That hurts voter turnout, organizing, fundraising, everything.

With a smaller, more extremist party, the few remaining Republican candidates will have to tack to the right to win primaries for Senate and House seats in 2010. This increases the odds that the general election voters, who don’t want to go to the right, will vote for Democratic candidates. So the GOP takes a whuppin’.

2012, same thing. The very Republicans who could be competitive in a general election for the presidency – Crist, Huntsman etc – are the guys who will be destroyed when they face GOP primary voters. Their presidential nominee will be from the Gingrich/Palin Axis – and will lose 30-40 states.

The last time the GOP was this screwed up was in 1910. The party was split between the supporters of Taft, who did what the party base wanted, mostly but not all the time, and Teddy Roosevelt, who was fed up with the crimes and outrages of Taft’s Wall Street masters and wanted to move to the center. The result: both men ran for the presidency in 1912, and Wilson won easily. The GOP’s official candidate, Taft, came in third. Third!

Could a third party take over second place in a coming presidential race? Wouldn’t it be cool if all the disaffected, ornery third-party folks – the ones who created the Perot phenomenon – banded together and formed the Libergreensocialreformtarian party? The perfect leader for this political tur-duck-en would be Lenora Fulani, who in the past has worked with the New Alliance Party, the International Workers Party, the Independence Party, the Patriot Party, and the Reform Party; her alliances have ranged from Al Sharpton to Pat Buchanan. And she creates a political circus wherever she goes. It would never happen, but boy if it did....


http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics2/69_of_gop_voters_say_republicans_in_congress_out_of_touch_with_the_party_base