This
data from the most recent Daily Kos poll is truly astonishing. On a broad range of questions, the country neatly divides into two groups:
- The South
- Everybody else.
It appears that the GOP's various cultural attacks are now unlikely to work anywhere outside the South, though perhaps due to intra regional difference they may succeed in parts of the Midwest or West. But the basic shape of public opinion is that most of the country is no longer interested in being envious, frustrated, or fearful of their fellow countrymen hundreds of miles away.
One hopes that these data will force the Republican party to shift its message in order to accommodate more voters in the Midwest and Northeast, but it's not clear that such a shift is truly
necessary. After all, continued economic doldrums might put Boehner in the Speaker's chair without any change in the party's message, at which point we'd all be back to square one.
2 comments:
That Southern Strategy was a resounding success, wasn't it?
If Kevin Phillips were still a Republican, he probably would have suggested to the GOP that maybe they shouldn't pursue his idea quite so obsessively. Or that it might be time to turn off the strategy after its first couple of decades of use.
The West is all lumped together in their data, in a way that mixes the Californian multitudes with the Senate-overrepresented Utahns and Wyomingians and Idahos (I don't know what these people call themselves). If all the regionalist madness has some kind of pull in the big empty states, it could work a bit better than this data indicates.
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