Eric Kleefeld over at TPM analyzes some very interesting Gallup Poll data and comes to this tongue-in-cheek schaedenfreude conclusion:
A separate question in the data set showed 59% of Republicans saying the party needs to be more conservative, compared to only 12% who say the party should be less conservative. So not only is the pool of Republican voters shrinking, but the ones who remain are really nuts.
We could be seeing the emergence of a pattern common in democracies, when a ruling party is turned out of power in a landslide: The folks who are left to pick up the pieces are often the most extreme elements, and are in fact the least fit to actually clean things up. The best examples of this are probably the UK Labour Party after they were beaten by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the Conservative Party after Tony Blair finally ousted them in 1997, and over here the Democrats when they lost in 1980 and then nominated Walter Mondale in 1984.
Hmm, can anyone say Palin/Bachmann in 2012?
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