The Incredible Shrinking GOP: Only 20 Percent Self-Identify As Republican
Okay, this is striking. Earlier this week a Washington Post poll made a big splash because it found that only 21 percent self-identify as Republicans. The abysmally low number got pundits and reporters talking about whether the GOP is shrinking to the point of irrelevance.
Now we have another poll that finds that the number of self-identified Republicans has dropped even lower: 20 percent.
My handy Plum Line calculator informs me that this means exactly one-fifth of adults identify themselves as Republican. Here are the key numbers, buried in the internals of the new NBC/WSJ poll (click to enlarge):
Thirteen percent identify themselves as a “strong Republican”; seven percent as a “not very strong Republican.” Total: Twenty percent.
So two polls this week have now found this, suggesting it’s probably not an outlier. Does anyone know if any other poll has found the number of self-identified GOPers hitting 20 percent?
Relatedly, I’m a bit surprised that these comments from Senator John Cornyn yesterday aren’t getting more attention. He vowed that the the GOP would one day “regain its status as a national party,” which is an admission from the head of the NRSC that it is no longer any such thing.
Update: DNC spokesperson Hari Sevugan emails over the following response:
When you’re devoid of new ideas, devoid of new leadership, and your only answer to the nation’s pressing problem is to say “NO,” it’s not surprising that moderate, independent voices can no longer identify with you. And all that remains are the fringe elements of a once grand old party that are far outside the American mainstream.
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So that leaves a net of about 42% lean Dem and 31% lean Rep, with the other 27% no significant indication. Compare this to the internals of the next poll you read.
has anyone ever seen it hit 20 percent before?
Also don’t forget ABC/WaPo poll from last week that said 78% do not have confidence in Republicans to make the right decisions for the country. That’s a startling number.
Not at a national level, not 20% no. And I’ve been doing polling for ten solid years.
How low do we think the GOP would have to go before they stop focusing on the finger that they are pointing at everyone else and start focusing on the three fingers that are pointing back at them???
Jenn D
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Thats hard to say. Its pretty clear that since the Republicans announced that they had found their voice after voting en masse against the stimulus bill their party identification numbers have dropped. That SHOULD tell them that they are on the right track. But so far i don’t see any evidence that they are paying attention.
Well, sg, i am a moderate, truly, i have voted dem and rep over the last 18 years and i have never seen anything like what is going on with the GOP and, i might add, the people that still support them. Among many GOP supporters, they are doing to many of us, the same thing that the rep’s are doing to spectar, snowe, collins etc. it does not matter if you agree with them on some things, as soon as you disagree with them on something, you are all of the sudden a leftist liberal. i have had it happen to me personally, friends and some of my few family members that are actually republican have now “cast me aside” so to speak because i support the President and most of his policies. they are “purging” me too and that is fine because i will tell you what i have told them…”you want me purged, fine i am purged, but until the republican leaders start supporting more people like crist, snowe, collins and spectar, you can count this moderate out, i will vote solidly democratic as long as the GOP continues down this road, i may not agree with every single democratic policy, but i disagree with current republican policy far greater!”
Jenn D – newly annointed leftist liberal!!!
JennD
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And that really gets at the heart of the matter. There is no give or leeway when it comes to republicans these days. Either you are for them or against them and it goes back to how George Bush politicized everything. That works when you have the majority of the people on your side like after 9-11, but once you become the minority in your policies and your positions all you do with that kind of talk is to further marginalize yourself. I think some people got so used to being able to question someone’s patriotism or loyalty when there was any dissent that they just can’t help themselves anymore. Obviously thats not the way to make friends and influence people. But bigger than that not only will you not add new members to your rank, you will end up purging those who have the nerve to actually think for themselves. Basically the echo chamber just gets louder and then you wonder why your poll numbers keep going down and the people you are attacking’s numbers keep going up. After the elections next year there are going to be millions of wingnuts wondering how in the world the Democrats gained more seats. Total lack of self awareness. I am sorry to hear about your family but I think success will be the best antidote. Once some of the people who have gotten caught up in face painting see the economy turn around and our foriegn policy working I think the light bulb will go off and they will also reject the polarizing GOP.
I hope so sg, most of my family are dems, but they didn’t ridicule me when i voted republican at times, however now that i am voting democratic, the rep family members are just ridiculous towards me…but as comedian ron white says “you can’t fix stupid”
Jenn: I understand; having been ordered to leave the family dinner table a couple of years ago because I said Clinton or Obama will end up being President. I still go to family events but I am the odd man out. I skipped Christmas dinner last year because I did not want to gloat.
Jenn D
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I think it will happen because nobody likes to be the fringe. Once your family notices that they are well outside the mainstream and fewer people are willing to engage them in conversation I have a feeling they will see the light. Thats whats so dangerous for the GOP. Nobody likes staying on a sinking ship.
In light of this, can you explain how a Republican poll that’s being cited by Mark Halperin and Ben Smith managed to find an electorate that’s split roughly even between Democrats and Republicans? (page 10 of the poll) http://thepage.time.com/2009/04/29/conservatives-marshall-new-data/
The WSJ/NBC poll keeps crashing my browser, so I can’t see if they used a registered voter/likely voter/something else screen (the poll oversampling Republicans just had registered voters).
Still, it suggests Gillespie’s guys were up to a very sketchy poll, a big outlier in terms of who they found in the electorate vs. who everyone else is finding.
alan~ well i didn’t have to skip dinner…my staunchly republican mother has made political talk off limits after we all (about 15 of us) all got into it during the primaries last spring, but she still gets her jabs in, although she is outnumbered.
sg~ i hope you are right, i thought it might ease up with the “conservative family and friends” after they saw that President Obama wasn’t a “leftist, secret muslim that was going to take over the entire country and force us all to follow the taliban” – see told you, “can’t fix stupid”
Anon: watch it mate. Any quote from Halperin has to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Drudge is at an undisclosed location nowdays (the one recently vacated by Cheney) so Halperin may have lost his bearings.
Anonymous
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Its called push polling
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http://www.resurgentrepublic.com/system/assets/7/original/RR_April_09_Toplines.pdf
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I am pretty sure that I can find a Democratic push poll that would show much different numbers. However neither would be accurate. Thats why its best to leave it up to Gallup and Pew
Anon~
Gotta be careful with Halperin and take him in context – the week of September 15th 2008 he called it a “McCain won the week” week and after the entire House GOP voted NO on the stimulus package he said that it was a “failure” on the part of President Obama – just keep this in mind when viewing his site
Greg,
Before you jump on the 20% Republican number, look at the responses to the voting question – Obama outperforms McCain by a substantially wider margin than the actual results. This raises the possibility that the sample is skewed in some fashion. Also notice that 35% label themselves as conservative, which would seem to confirm the notion that the Republican brand is tarnished, but not necessarily conservatism in general
It is a source of some amusement to me that Mike Allen and Mark Halperin are treated as serious journalists by the Villagers. Two of the most committed Village stenographers have managed to get themselves lucrative billets. How do they do it?
I lost my brother over him being a hard core rightie and me being a Dem. My other brother and I just shake our heads. It really upsets me. We were raised in a Dem home and I just don’t understand why he is so far right. We can not send anything to each other that involves politics. It has really ruined our relationship. We use to be so close. It will never be the same. It breaks my heart.
No biggie. Most conservatives don’t know the Republican party, given the outrageous spending during the final Bush years. But this does not mean a net gain for Democrats.
As the Tea Parties made evident, incredibly large deficits, government motors, carbon tax, and the like are a warning to both sides of the aisle. And the Tea Parties will only increase in number and size going forward.
I’m rather stunned by some of the accounts above where family rancor over politics has reached those levels. When I got involved in my first campaign (in Canada) at 18, our family home had two large signs on the lawn for two different parties (my dad was an activist too).
But there has been something quite ugly going on in the US for several decades now where the right found it advantageous to demonize liberalism as traitorous. Talk radio has been the fundamental instrument in this process. That they have and do foment hatred is undeniable. One just needs to listen to it and to the calls coming in.
Whether the motivation is political or profit or some combination of those two things (which is, I think, the case) is really irrelevant. The consequences are we see and experience.
Um, did it occur to you that this poll is utter bs created by the MSM to make Obama look good? Consider the new Rasmussen Poll showing the Generic Preference for Congress now favors republicans by 3 points?
Polls are easy to game. Rasmussen may put a thumb on the scale for Republicans, but Gallup and Pew do the same for Democrats.
Someone has to speak for those Americans, like myself, who are worried about drowning in the Democrats’ ocean of red ink. If not Republicans, then who?
Someone earlier in the thread put a finger on an important point: While the number of self-identifying Republicans has fallen, the number identifying as conservatives has remained relatively stable at around 30-35%. It’s also interesting that up to 30% (in some polls) of self-identifying conservatives — I assume mostly conservative Dems and independents — support Obama.
It looks like the conservative movement is splintering. The label still commands broad allegience, but it increasingly means different things to different “conservatives”.
A lot of them appear to agree on one thing, though: The GOP sucks. Moderate conservatives think the party has moved to far too the wacko right, while the wacko right thinks the party establishment still isn’t wacko enough.
This makes it just about impossible for the party to capitalize on the less popular parts of Obama’s program — including that “ocean of red ink.” The moderates are too marginalized and compromised, while the wackos can’t seem to get it through their heads that absolute loathing of Obama and everything he stands for isn’t a very appealing political message.
As a liberal who lived through the early Reagan years, I know exactly how they feel. It took liberals more than a decade to accept that Reagan had won, and that they were the ones who had to adapt. I suspect it’s going to take conservatives even longer.
Don’t expect a Republican resurgence. After Hover, the GOP was sentences to fifty years in the political wilderness.
DO expect a sharp ascension of the Libertarian Party to replace the GOP, *if* it can grow up.
Fast.
Should read “After HOOVER, the GOP was SENTENCED to…”
Me.
Sticky keys.
I personally think that the Republican party is dying because it’s original principals of fiscal conservatism have been compromised for some fundamentalist evangelical adgenda that is being spearheaded by the likes of Bush and Palin…a lot of more fiscally conservative types have moved towards Libertarianism undoubtedly…as someone who has relativly more conservative fiscal beliefs but cannot abide fundamental Christianity seeping its way into politics…I identify as a Libertarian myself…if Libertarian Party does replace the Republican Party, it will really just be a matter of fiscal politics, because social the Libertarian and Democratic Party platforms are pretty similar.
Ugh, Libertarians are frightening. Anyone who thinks the people are capable of getting by with the bare minimum of government supervision are bloody fools.
Actually, the “Incredibly Shrinking Republican Party” has been 40 years in the making, ever since Richard Nixon embarked on his “Southern Strategy” of appealing to alienated Southern white conservatives angered by the Democrats’ embrace of the civil rights movement.
Four decades later, today’s GOP has become what the Democrats were for most of its history prior to the 1950s: An almost lily-white, Southern-dominated, conservative, male-dominated party.
Having long ago lost the support of African-Americans because of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” having lost the support of the majority of women, having lost the support of Latinos — the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population — and most tellingly, having lost the support of the vast majority of young people, it may already be too late to save the Republican Party from extinction as a national political force.
When you lose 82 percent of independent voters, who now comprise a 47 percent plurality of the electorate and could form their own political party if they wanted to, the GOP is doomed unless it takes a dramatic turn back toward the moderate mainstream — something that its far-right lunatic fringe who now dominate the party will never allow.
just finished reading this article and all the comments and it strikes me as an exercise in futility about the labels everyone uses. It is the results of the elections that show almost an evenly divided electorate, with some exceptions. From 50 plus to 40 plus is the norm. This 20’s number doesn’t compute. The congress numbers alter after every election of a president with a dependency on the success of “pleasing” the electorate. This also means, to me, that the percentages Democrats are claiming won’t compute.
The republican demise is very scary. It’s creating a power vacuum on the right which is being filled with crazy media extremists. God save us all if the GOP dies and the Libertarians fill the void. Conspiracy theories will become a legitimate political platform.
Don’t forget Alex Jones when naming right wing nuts.