by Mark Silva
The share of people who consider themselves independent of any political party is at its highest level in 70 years, the Pew Research Center reports today, and affiliation with the Republican Party is "at its lowest level in at least a quarter century.''
By many measures, Pew's Andrew Kohut reports, "the Republican Party is at low ebb - from image, to morale to demographic vitality.''
These are among the findings of Pew's long-term values study project, which has tracked American attitudes that shape opinion and influence voting behavior since 1987. The headline on the newest one: "Independents take center stage in Obama era.''
"As the Obama era begins,'' reports Kohut, president of the independent Washington-based research institute, "the survey finds that centrism has emerged as a dominant factor in public opinion....
"The growing political middle is steadfastly mixed in its beliefs about government, the free market and other values that underlie views on contemporary issues and policies,'' he adds.
The decline in Republican allegiance does not signal any turn toward the left, the study finds. Fewer people favor the government "providing a safety net for the poor and increasing help for the needy, if it means more debt, than did so two years ago,'' and the public "remains conflicted about government's role and views of the private sector.''
Fully 86 percent of those surveyed say government needs to do more to make health care affordable and accessible, yet nearly half - 46 percent -- are concerned about "the government becoming too involved in health care."
"Today's Republican Party is smaller but not substantially more conservative than in recent years,'' Kohut notes of a party that is nonetheless aging and less reflective of "the growing ethnic and racial diversity of the general public.
In the past 10 years, the average age of people who consider themselves Republican has increased from 45.5 to 48.3, the survey finds, and the Republican Party remains as "dominated by non-Hispanic whites'' - 88 percent - as they were eight years ago.
Democrats are now younger than Republicans, on average, for the first time in at least 20 years, though the proportion of non-Hispanic whites has declined from 64 percent in 2000 to 56 percent now.
"An increased number of Americans - especially Democrats - completely agree that the U.S. should play an active role in world affairs,'' Kohut notes. "Support for free trade is unexpectedly higher than a year ago,'' and "despite broad support for stricter
environmental laws and regulation, the public's willingness to pay higher prices and suffer slower economic growth for environmental protection has declined substantially from two years ago.''
The 2009 survey included 3,013 adults interviewed between March 31 and April 21. For more on the results, see the Pew report.
Comments
Conservatives may have dwindling ranks, increasing illegitimacy and the headwind of a very well-liked President Obama eager to implement a popular agenda to deal with. But that is simply not what they gained from the election season. Their take was that McCain was insufficiently conservative (!) and that, besieged on all sides, they must stand up for the people and put the brakes on this whole "change" fad. They have nothing left but ideology, and the Drudge/Fox/talk radio megaphone that it still able to mainline that ideology into the public opinion stream. The years of groupthink have proved to BOTH sides in Washington that only conservative populists are the holders of the popular will, regardless of, you know, election returns.
Posted by: former Republican | May 21, 2009 3:08 PM
Dear Conservative Teabaggers,
Nobody is trying to stop you from holding your "teabagger parties." Please stop saying you're oppressed when you're clearly not oppressed. You want to have a tea party? Go ahead! Get to it! Take to the streets, pleasantly aromatic baggies in hand!
The rest of us find your "tea bagging" to be superbly instructive. It's increasing taxes on the rich that gets your goat, and absolutely nothing else. The only Constitutional crisis possible is one that might possibly affect your wallet; offenses to other people's freedoms don't rouse a tenth of the same emotion.
And it stands as a dramatic act of solidarity with conservative leaders in government. Bloviate at every opportunity; remain steadfastly in opposition to everything; suggest nothing; claim that it is not even your responsibility to suggest anything. Like House and Senate Republicans, who have declared sitting on their hands to be an act of supreme virtue and who, when pressed, can only come up with a few terse pages of declarations that the only path forward is to give big businesses more tax breaks, and rich Americans more tax breaks, and eliminate even more regulations on financial behavior -- and that will work this time for sure, in spite of those same exact things bringing the country debt and corruption every other time they have been tried, finally leading to this current brink of economic ruin. No, it seems hard to compete with any acts of leadership as impressive as that.
So teabag your little hearts out, my noble friends! Take to the streets, and demand the conservative dream -- absolute inaction on every front! Turn the economic crisis into an opportunity to finally, at long last, give a damn about the actions of your leaders, who we have just now noticed might be of an opposing political party! Yes, take to the streets on behalf of the John Galts of the world: that's what Fox News Corporation has told you to do, and what the stock traders of CNBC demand of you! Take a day off work and wave those little white bags so that an executive responsible for financial crisis will not find their yearly bonus jeopardized by scandalous government intervention, or people making one hundred times your annual income will not be taxed a Stalinesque three percent more (marginal rate) than they presently are! Throw your little pouches of aromatic leaves high into the air, shout your grievances, demand the factories close and the government remain unresponsive, because that's what conservatives everywhere want to see!
Best Wishs,
3/4 of America and the rest of the World.
Posted by: America Shrugged | May 21, 2009 3:30 PM
America 2016
I’m taking bets on the probability of whether the United States will still be a free and independent nation at the end of Obama’s first term. I think it’s a toss-up at this point, 50-50 odds. Should he win a second term and hold onto the presidency through 2016, it’s a no contest. We won’t have a chance.
It would be a sucker’s bet anyway since the handwriting is all over the walls and all over the Obama administration and anyway it’s supposed to be immoral to bet on a sure thing.
By 2012, America’s national integrity will have been so undermined by internationalism, at the bottom of which is always the ungentle hand of the United Nations, that we will be gasping for air; by 2016, our nation will be unrecognizable.
Can we all join together and say, “National hari kari?”
One report reinforcing that pessimistic view is this laughable but all-too-factual account: http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=48360.
Harold Koh, President Obama’s nominee to be top political advisor to Hillary Clinton’s State Department, has contrived what superficially is a novel idea, namely that the United States courts, including SCOTUS, incorporate “international laws and customs into domestic law, whether through the legislative process or through federal courts’ use of international law in interpreting the Constitution of the United States.”
Oh, really? Isn’t that just a peachy keen idea?
Koh is another of the muddle-headed aparatchiks that Obama so loves and who is so enamored of European and other international life, laws, and tribunals that they put to shame the legal thought in America.
Lest Harold believes he was proposing a unique idea, sorry to disillusion him but his partner in crime, SCOTUS Justice Stephen Breyer offered a similar proposal some years ago: http://abajournal.com/news/breyer_natl_legal_systems_are_finding_common_ground/
Try to keep up, Harry!
Their subversive and operative thinking is that our legal system is so infested with nationalism that America should scrap 220 years of our heritage and subscribe to the legal philosophies of those who know better than we as to what’s best. We should therefore become legal lapdogs for the far more urbane and intelligent systems of France, Germany, and maybe even India, Tazakhistan, and Zimbabwe.
True, many of American jurists’ opinions of the past few decades suggest that liberal-leftist judges have been more concerned with their interpretations of social justice, civil rights, etc. than they have been influenced by the meaning and intent of our Constitution and laws but this would be a giant leap backward even for most of them.
Koh’s leap toward “transnational law” would be a leap into an international cesspool and I wish him the best of luck doing the breast stroke. As for America’s adopting his precepts, I wish him only his deserved ignominy.
Why America should go that route Koh doesn’t say, aside from the implication . . .
(Read the rest at http://genelalor.com/)
Posted by: Gene Lalor | May 21, 2009 4:34 PM
My God Gene you wet off your medicine again. You better call your Doctor. What are you talking about? Give me three examples of how our president is doing any of this.
Posted by: no spin | May 21, 2009 11:32 PM