US city-states

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

Sorry, Johnny, but you're wrong.

Based on what I've seen you post, here, in the past year, I believe the reason you don't believe the GOP is right wing is because you are further out to the right than most of them.

You may not be an extremist, per se, but you're on the rightward fringe of American political views.

Most Americans are pro-choice, in at least some circumstances.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com...over-abortion/

Most Americans favor separation of church and state, favor a path to citizenship for immigrants (especially those brought here as children), and are okay with the presence of Muslims in the United States.

Sorry, no. Completely false.

If any of that were true, or at least if anybody in the Democratic Party leadership believed that was true, we'd have a totally different politics than we do.

The polls are untrustworthy in part because the pollsters themselves have agendas, and in part because the respondents are using the same words to mean radically different things. 'Separation of church and state', for ex, means something entirely different to a traditionalist, a libertarian, or a liberal, but all 3 will say they believe in it even as they are saying contradictory things.

If most people really believed in a 'path to citizenship', it would have happened between 2009 and 2011, when the Dems could have passed it trivially easily (they had supermajorities in both houses, the Presidency, and the GOP was privately on the same side.

To use immigration as an example, the reason they (the Congressional Dems) wanted the GOP on board with the amnesty bills so desperately is because they know the majority is not OK with a 'path to citizenship', unless you first do enforcement and stop the inflow. Then they're probably OK with it, though I suspect that is eroding with growing anger.

The Dems knew that there would be enormous public anger if they did it, including among big swaths of their core voters, so they wanted the GOP on board to give them cover, and so the GOP could take the blame. When you have the public on your side, and think that's likely to last, you don't go for 'bipartisan support' if you don't have to. You go for the political payoff and blame the other guy for defying the public.

The Dems in Congress wouldn't do that on immigration because they know all too well how the politics really play out.

http://publicreligion.org/site/wp-co...can-Report.pdf

Compare those findings to what the candidates say when they address the voter base, during the primary campaign season.

Those findings are worthless, because the source is untrustworthy.

Publicreligion.org an agitprop channel for the anti-religious left, and the Brookings Institute isn't much better. It's like citing the Southern Poverty Law Center for information about who is a 'hate group', the bogus source discredits the claim.

Not that there aren't such sources on the right, too.

Now then, you are correct in that the national GOP leadership is probably more moderate than the base, and favors de-regulation and limited government spending (on everything except the military and infrastructure) much more than they do social issues.

They favor whatever the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants, much like the Dem leadership. K street and Tom Donahue are calling the shots in Washington right now, with both parties.

In point of fact, Democrats took more votes in the House of Representative races, in 2014. The only reason the GOP won was because the Republican-dominated legislatures gerrymandered the district boundaries.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...got-a-mandate/

That makes no difference, because we don't election Representatives nationally. The GOP won that race because they turned out that years and Dems were dispirited and stayed home. The GOP also didn't have a Romney or a McCain on the ticket to depress their own side's turnout in 2014.

I think you make a cogent point about how things work on the GOP side of the fence, but on the Democratic side, there is much less in the way of a problematic divide between the party leadership and the rank-and-file. Partly, that's because the Democrats have always been divided; they're used to it, and have learned to deal with it by wheeling-and-dealing, as needed.

The Dems are terrified, and I do mean terrified, of a possible looming black/Hispanic split, and the possibility of immigration, which is central to their 'business model' becoming a liability because of it.

They're also worried that the GOP will change and begin hitting them where they are vulnerable, rather than where they are strong.

Also, it's because union Democrats are far less powerful than in the past (and you can thank Reagan for that), as compared to the "limousine liberal" adherents to the Democratic Leadership Conference (DLC) point of view. If the unions don't have as much pull, they can't pull the Democrats apart, either.

The labor-Dems are the least divisive and unpopular of all their major factions. It's just that they are unpopular and inconvenient the Dems' business elites, which oddly enough are the same business elites that dominate the GOP.

You can point to one particular race, or a particular issue, and cherry-pick outcomes to show whatever you like. However, when you look at national numbers, the trend is pretty clear, I think.

Exactly my point. We can observe the actions of both parties' leadership to give the lie to their rhetoric.

If the GOP gets rid of Trump before the end of the year, AND Trump doesn't run as an independent spoiler, AND the GOP nominates Jeb Bush or some other moderate, Clinton wins narrowly.

Against Jeb? Probably. He's their dream opponent, in the same way that Romney was in 2012 (actually, the Dems would have preferred Huntsman to Romney, but Romney was second best.)

If the GOP gets rid of Trump, AND Trump quietly goes away, AND the GOP nominates a social conservative, Hillary wins slightly less big, but still wins by a larger margin than she'd beat Bush.

Depends on which social conservative and how he ran. They'd have a far better chance of winning than Jeb, because of simple math. It's all about turnout.

Trump's a clown, and he's offending huge swathes of the voting demographic,

Yes, he's a clown, and no, he's not offending huge swaths of the voting demographic. The people offended by what he's saying are mostly locked in Dems, the GOP has no realistic chance of winning their votes no matter what they do, unless they do things that alienate their indispensable voters and then they lose anyway.

and the longer he shoots off his mouth, the more damage he'll do -- and that's because most people believe that what he says actually, truly does reflect the popular opinions of the GOP rank-and-file, and the rest of the country finds those views absolutely grotesque.

A lot of what he says, does reflect the GOP rank-and-file, thought I doubt he believes it himself, and no, that's not the part of the GOP agenda that repels the rest of the country. The business agenda, like it or not, is.

But you've got a point about the OT tangent.