Virginia Could Soon Place the Equal Rights Amendment in the U.S. Constitution

As the Washington Post is reporting, the Virginia Senate today voted to pass the federal Equal Rights Amendment with seven Republicans joining Democrats on a 26-to-14 vote.  Now the vote goes to the far more reactionary House of Delegates where Republicans hold a one vote majority - at least until the 2019 Virginia elections in November.   The Washington Post looks at the vote:

The GOP-led state Senate voted Tuesday to make Virginia the 38th and final state to ratify the federal Equal Rights Amendment.

The measure passed with bipartisan support, with seven Republicans joining Democrats on a 26-to-14 vote. The measure faces tougher odds in the House of Delegates and beyond, including hurdles related to long-expired deadlines for passage. . . . . The Senate resolution now heads to the House, where comparable House legislation remains in committee.

Advocates hope they have more momentum this year with Republican sponsorship of the Senate resolution. Sen. Glen H. Sturtevant Jr. (R-Chesterfield) sponsored the legislation and joined a bus tour promoting it last year.

A piece in New York Magazine looks at the bigger picture should the House of Delegates likewise pass the ERA amendment.  Here are article excerpts:

For those of us who came of age at a time when the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment seemed as inevitable as it was overdue, the ERA’s sudden revival in the Trump era has been a marvelous development. Today the Virginia Senate ratified the amendment, which means the Old Dominion is halfway through the process of becoming the crucial 38th state — three-fourths of the 50 states — to get onboard since Congress passed the ERA in 1972.

The amendment’s language is extremely simple:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Its practical implications may depend on what Congress does to implement it, but in effect, it would serve as a constitutional backdrop to more specific protections of gender equality, and as an ongoing basis for challenging discrimination in the courts.

The ERA was long thought to be comatose, if not dead, after only 35 states ratified it prior to the expiration of a 1982 ratification deadline set by Congress. But inspired by doubts about the constitutionality of ratification deadlines, and perhaps some defiance toward the manifest pigginess of the 45th president, momentum for the ERA resumed, with Nevada ratifying it in 2017 and Illinois in 2018.

Perhaps the big shift toward Democrats in 2017 House elections in Virginia, and the strong possibility that Democrats could take control of that chamber this November, could motivate Republicans to stop their obstruction of the ERA. It’s certainly a good sign that seven Republican senators joined all 19 Democrats in voting for the ratification in the upper chamber.

If Virginia does ratify the amendment, the legal maneuvering will begin, as the New York Times noted last year:

Expect a legal showdown, intense lobbying and constitutional fireworks …

[T]he debate would be interesting, and would offer the Grand Old Party yet another opportunity to recant its abandonment, under the influence of the conservative movement, of an ancient party tradition of supporting an ERA, as Katie Kilkenny observed in 2015:

Republicans installed the first woman in Congress and shepherded the 19th Amendment through a Republican-dominated Congress in 1919. . . . .

And Republicans began putting the ERA into party platforms in 1944, and didn’t definitively begin rejecting the amendment until Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the leadership of the party in 1980.

At a time when women are repudiating Republicans at the polls to a remarkable extent, it would be a good time for the GOP to wake up and embrace equality as sufficiently central to American principles to merit inclusion in the Constitution.

Who would lead the opposition?  Christofascists who want to be able to subordinate women and angry white men fearful of losing even more patriarchy based privilege. 

The Angry White Male Caucus

Donald Trump and his racist campaign tore America apart.  The hearings on spoiled rich boy - and seemingly abusive drunk - Brett Kavanaugh has only served to further inflame the animosity that Trump/Pence set loose.  But behind all of the hate and venom there is ultimately one thing: white anger over feared loss of special privilege.  While much of the anger is centered in white working class males, the same fear anger/seems to motivate a number of affluent white men - and women, some of whom are "friends" and fellow members of the yacht club I belong to.  How these women go to church each Sunday and feign piety and moral decency is dumbfounding.  The same, of course, applies to the affluent men, but at least they (other than Christofascists) have the honesty of putting on less false piety and sanctimoniousness than their wives.  A column in the New York Times looks at this white anger and rage that further dispels  the myth of economic anxiety being the motivating factor for Trump voters. Here are highlights:

When Matt Damon did his Brett Kavanaugh imitation on “Saturday Night Live,” you could tell that he nailed it before he said a word. It was all about the face — that sneering, rage-filled scowl. Kavanaugh didn’t sound like a judge at his Senate hearing last week, let alone a potential Supreme Court justice . . .

But then again, Lindsey Graham, who went through the hearing with pretty much the same expression on his face, didn’t look much like a senator, either.

There have been many studies of the forces driving Trump support, and in particular the rage that is so pervasive a feature of the MAGA movement. What Thursday’s hearing drove home, however, was that white male rage isn’t restricted to blue-collar guys in diners. It’s also present among people who’ve done very well in life’s lottery, whom you would normally consider very much part of the elite.

In other words, hatred can go along with high income, and all too often does.

At this point there’s overwhelming evidence against the “economic anxiety” hypothesis — the notion that people voted for Donald Trump because they had been hurt by globalization. In fact, people who were doing well financially were just as likely to support Trump as people who were doing badly.

What distinguished Trump voters was, instead, racial resentment. Furthermore, this resentment was and is driven not by actual economic losses at the hands of minority groups, but by fear of losing status in a changing country, one in which the privilege of being a white man isn’t what it used to be.

And here’s the thing: It’s perfectly possible for a man to lead a comfortable, indeed enviable life by any objective standard, yet be consumed with bitterness driven by status anxiety.

And this sort of high-end resentment, the anger of highly privileged people who nonetheless feel that they aren’t privileged enough or that their privileges might be eroded by social change, suffuses the modern conservative movement.

It starts, of course, at the top, with that walking, talking, golfing bundle of resentment that is Donald Trump. You might imagine that a man who lives in the White House would no longer feel the need to, for example, make false claims about his college record. But Trump still doesn’t get the respect he obviously craves.

Indeed, it seems apparent that his jihad against Barack Obama was fueled by envy: Obama was a black man who was also a class act, with all the grace and poise Trump lacks. And Trump couldn’t stand it.

As a lot of reporting shows, the angry face Kavanaugh presented to the world last week wasn’t something new, brought on by the charges of past abuse. Classmates from his Yale days describe him as a belligerent heavy drinker even then. His memo to Ken Starr as he helped harass Bill Clinton — in which he declared that “it is our job to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear” — shows rage as well as cynicism.

And Kavanaugh, like Trump, is still in the habit of embellishing his academic record after all these years, declaring that he got into Yale despite having “no connections.” In fact, he was a legacy student whose grandfather went there.  Indeed, my guess is that his privileged roots are precisely why he’s so angry.

But it’s privilege under siege. An increasingly diverse society no longer accepts the God-given right of white males from the right families to run things, and a society with many empowered, educated women is finally rejecting the droit de seigneur once granted to powerful men.

And nothing makes a man accustomed to privilege angrier than the prospect of losing some of that privilege, especially if it comes with the suggestion that people like him are subject to the same rules as the rest of us.

So what we got last week was a view into the soul of Trumpism. It’s not about “populism” — it would be hard to find a judge as anti-worker as Brett Kavanaugh. Instead, it’s about the rage of white men, upper class as well as working class, who perceive a threat to their privileged position. And that rage may destroy America as we know it.

Sorry, but I have no sympathy for these angry whites who see minorities, gays, and women as threatening their special rights and privileges. 

Trump Can't Save White Christian America

As noted in a recent post, the number one cause of the decline of Christianity in America is the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who through their lies, hypocrisy and general hatred of others have made the entire Christian brand, if you will, toxic.  Yet despite this reality, 81% of evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump who shamelessly prostituted himself to the Christofascists and held himself out as the would be savior of the self-anointed "godly folk."  A constant campaign meme from Trump was the broadcasting of the myth that American Christians are being subjected to persecution.  As other post have explored, this myth is a lie and if the Christofascists are experiencing anything, it is a growing opposition to the Christofascists' persecution of others.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at why Trump will not be able to halt the decline of white Christian America.  Here are article highlights:

Down the home stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, one of Donald Trump’s most consistent talking points was a claim that America’s changing demographics and culture had brought the country to a precipice. He repeatedly cast himself as the last chance for Republicans and conservative white Christians to step back from the cliff, to preserve their power and way of life. In an interview on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in early September, Trump put the choice starkly for the channel’s conservative Christian viewers: “If we don’t win this election, you’ll never see another Republican and you’ll have a whole different church structure."

Michele Bachmann, a member of Trump’s evangelical executive advisory board, echoed these same sentiments in a speech at the Values Voters Summit, an annual meeting attended largely by conservative white Christians. That same week, she declared in an interview with CBN: “If you look at the numbers of people who vote and who lives [sic] in the country and who Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want to bring in to the country, this is the last election when we even have a chance to vote for somebody who will stand up for godly moral principles. This is it.” Post-election polling from the Public Religion Research Institute, which I lead, and The Atlantic showed that this appeal found its mark among conservative voters. Nearly two-thirds (66 percent) of Trump voters, compared to only 22 percent of Clinton voters, agreed that “the 2016 election represented the last chance to stop America’s decline.”

Does Trump’s victory, then, represent the resurrection of White Christian America? The consequences of the 2016 elections are indeed sweeping. . . . . The evidence, however, suggests that Trump’s unlikely victory is better understood as the death rattle of White Christian America—the cultural and political edifice built primarily by white Protestant Christians—rather than as its resuscitation. Despite the election’s immediate and dramatic consequences, it’s important not to over-interpret Trump’s win, which was extraordinarily close. Out of more than 136 million votes cast, Trump’s victory in the Electoral College came down to a razor-thin edge of only 77,744 votes across three states . . .

Trump’s intense appeal to 2016 as the “last chance” election seems to have spurred conservative white Christian voters to turn out to vote at particularly high rates . . . . white evangelicals went from being overrepresented by five percentage points at the ballot box in 2008 to being overrepresented by nine percentage points in 2016. This is an impressive feat to be sure, but one less and less likely to be replicated as their decline in the general population continues.

[T]wo trends with 2015-2016 data also confirms that the overall patterns of demographic and cultural change are continuing. . . . . The percentage of white Christians in the country fell from 54 percent in 2008 to 47 percent in 2014. That percentage has fallen again in each subsequent year, to 45 percent in 2015 and to 43 percent in 2016. Similarly, the percentage of Americans who supported same-sex marriage rose from 40 percent in 2008 to 54 percent in 2014 . .  . but jumped to 58 percent in 2016.

[T]he key long-term trends indicate White Christian America’s decline is continuing unabated. Over the last eight years, the percentage of Americans who identify as white and Christian fell 11 percentage points, and support for same-sex marriage jumped 18 percentage points. . . . . “The waning numbers of white Christians in the country today may not have time on their side, but as the sun is slowly setting on the cultural world of White Christian America, they’ve managed, at least in this election, to rage against the dying of the light.”

Twenty years from now, there is little chance that 2016 will be celebrated as the revival of White Christian America, no matter how many Christian right leaders are installed in positions of power over the next four years. Rather, this election will mostly likely be remembered as the one in which white evangelicals traded away their integrity and influence in a gambit to resurrect their past.

Meanwhile, the major trends transforming the country continue. If anything, evangelicals’ deal with Trump may accelerate the very changes it was designed to arrest, as a growing number of non-white and non-Christian Americans are repulsed by the increasingly nativist, tribal tenor of both conservative white Christianity and conservative white politics. At the end of the day, white evangelicals’ grand bargain with Trump will be unable to hold back the sheer weight of cultural change, and their descendants will be left with the only real move possible: acceptance.

I hope the author is correct.  Indeed, I hope the decline of the Christofascists accelerates.  

Trump’s Angry White Men

The ascendancy of Donald Trump in American politics says little positive about the nation, but is particularly telling in the manner in which it shows the misogyny that reigns among white males, especially those who are poorly educated.    Having two daughters, Trump is the antithesis of what I see as a decent, moral individual, most certainly when it comes to his treatment of women.  His views on minorities, and I suspect gays as well, are little better. One can only hope that the women of America and minorities hated by Trump and his Neo-Nazi like supporters will see the danger that the man poses and get out and vote.  Michael Gerson, a long time Republican and former White House staffer looks at the ugliness fueling Trump's support.  Here are highlights: 

What do most of the chief advisers and surrogates of the Trump campaign have in common? I’m thinking of Chris Christie, Roger Ailes, Stephen Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich.

What could possibly unite this diverse group? They are white, middle-aged (and older) males — not that there is anything wrong with that. They are almost psychotically sycophantic. (According to Gingrich, Donald Trump won an “enormous, historic victory” in the first presidential debate. Both Christie and Giuliani have called Trump a “genius” for avoiding federal taxes.) They are very forgiving about certain foibles (“everybody” commits adultery, explains Giuliani) and rather tough on others (Miss Universe Alicia Machado, says Gingrich, was “not supposed to gain 60 pounds”). They apparently lack the gene for irony (“America’s mayor” is smitten with a candidate who has flirted with 9/11 conspiracy theories).

The ascendance of people such as Gingrich, Giuliani and Trump in the Republican Party, from one perspective, is succeeding. A campaign of shouting, apocalyptic, white men has undeniably appealed to white men. A recent Post-ABC News poll found Trump up 40 points against Hillary Clinton in this category. Up nearly 60 points among white men with no college degree. These results are remarkable, indicating both the limits of Clinton as a candidate and the fury in portions of middle-class and blue-collar America.

If the United States is truly in the midst of a wave election, fed by the fears and discontent of white males, it will have enormous consequences in a country that has moved considerably in the direction of diversity, tolerance and inclusion. A very real culture war will be in full swing, not between social conservatives and social liberals, but between a movement of white economic and cultural grievances and a party of social elites and ascendant minorities. This struggle — rooted in race and class — would be far more bitter than the old culture war of ideas.

Trump’s version of Eden is lounging at the grotto at the Playboy Mansion or smoking cigars in the back room at the Sands, with a little Studio 54 thrown in. This is the man who reportedly pressured his future wife Marla Maples to appear in Playboy and negotiated the deal; who appeared in a soft-core porn video himself (not naked, thank goodness, but breaking a champagne bottle over a limo); and who recently took to Twitter to urge Americans to view a sex tape. This is the man who boasted about his penis size and made amenstruation joke during debates and has a consistent history of demeaning women as “pigs” and “dogs.”

I wonder how Trump evangelicals explain to their sons and daughters that this man is a suitable leader for a great country. I know that people in some minority groups are genuinely frightened by the possibility of Trump’s election. . . . . I also know that if Trump ends up losing in November, it will be because women rallied in large numbers to defeat him.

Conservatives oriented toward reform and outreach — longing for the leadership of Nikki Haley, Tim Scott and Marco Rubio — are largely waiting in shelters for the storm to pass. But what of the Republican Party will be left?

I truly believe that the Republican Party needs to die given its open descent into racism and hatred of so many fellow citizens.  The irony, of course, is that the poorly educated white males supporting Trump will likely be even worse off over time if Trump  wins the White House and implements his tax breaks for the wealthy (including himself).   I find it difficult to have sympathy for these men.  Perhaps less fixation on sports - the current opiate of the lower classes, in my view - and more focus on schooling and education would have allowed them to have found better lives.  But that would mean taking personal responsibility rather than blaming others for their state in life. 

The GOP and Donald Trump's Racism

For decades now, the Republican Party has used dog whistle racism to win the votes of those who like to see themselves as decent people, but who deep down long for white privilege and the "good old days."  Making matters worse, the party for decades has been prostituting itself to rabid Christofacsists who are (i) out of touch with reality, by definition, and (ii) more often than not, racists.  Along the way, sane, rational and decent people fled the party.  The culmination of this process has been Donald Trump as the GOP presidential nominee - a man who doesn't even engage in the pleasantry of using dog whistle calls to racism and bigotry.  Now that the GOP has made racism a key pillar to its identity, leaders who have encouraged the process are faced with the reality that a majority of Americans find both open racism and the GOP abhorrent.  Thus, the Paul Ryans of the party have the dilemma of determining how to proceed.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this self-created problem.  Here are highlights:

Paul Ryan appeared today in Washington, D.C.’s impoverished and overwhelmingly black Anacostia neighborhood to promote the House Republican agenda. The visit was steeped in racial symbolism, a long-planned photo op intended to convey Ryan’s no-doubt-sincere belief that his party’s policies would better the lives of the urban poor by freeing them from the dependence of subsidy (and, by reducing taxes and regulations on business owners, supplying them with more jobs). Unfortunately for Ryan, the visit came as the news media was in a full-blown frenzy over racist comments made by Donald Trump against Gonzalo Curiel, the judge in his fraud trial. The contradiction between the two could not be ignored.

The trouble for Republicans is that building a real-world constituency for these policies does rely on racism. Conservatives stopped the momentum of the New Deal in the mid-1960s only when they associated it with support for the black underclass. Republican politics has grown increasingly racialized over time, a trend that has dramatically accelerated during the Obama era.

Over the last eight years, the tension between these two things has grown unbearable for conservatives. Republican voting support is increasingly coterminous with white racial resentment even as conservatives firmly believe in their own racial innocence. Conservatives have built an alternative history in which racism, rather than migrating to the Republican Party as white Southerners revolted against the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights, remained in the Democratic Party all along.

Conservatives deny the existence of racism in the Republican Party as a matter of doctrinal sanctity, just as Soviet authorities had to officially deny the existence of poverty in the USSR.

Trump has ratcheted the tension between theory and reality to unbearable levels. Of course, Trump has exploited racism for years, from his public demand to execute what turned out to be innocent black youths a quarter-century ago to his birtherism to his crude bigotry toward Mexican and Muslim immigrants. But because his outbursts against Curiel are bigoted in such an undisguised fashion, with no policy pretext to hide behind, they forced the question into the open.

[T]he overwhelming majority of Republicans committed to supporting Trump have engaged in various tortured constructions. “I would not have said what he said, but then I don’t know all the facts,” asserted Senator Charles Grassley. “My experience with Donald Trump is he doesn’t have a prejudicial bone in his body,” said Orrin Hatch.

Even those Republicans willing to describe the statement as racist (and not merely as something that implied racism) presented it as a singular mistake that did not reflect their nominee’s belief system.

Ryan hates the words that come out of Trump’s mouth, but he draws no conclusions from them and will endorse him anyway because Trump will sign Ryan’s bills into law. “I do absolutely disavow those comments,” he pleaded. “I think they are wrong. I don’t think they are right-headed. And the thinking behind it is something I don’t personally relate to. But at the end of the day this is about ideas. This is about moving our agenda forward.” Somehow, once again, Ryan’s agenda found itself in the anomalous position of depending on a racist in order to prevail. 

The Connection between Obama’s Skin Color And Tea Party/GOP Support

Some of us have long recognized that racism is a driving force for Republican and Tea Party opposition to, if not outright hatred towards Barack Obama.  Now, through a study, psychologists seem to have confirmed this reality by using altered photos of Barack Obama and others - some with lightened skin tones and others with darkened skin tones - to gauge reactions.  Not surprisingly, among conservatives in particular, darker skin tones illicited negative responses.  The findings show the lie to claims that we are living in a post racist society.  The sad fact is that racism, especially on the right, is alive and well and these folks - including many of the fundamentalist Christian "godly folk" cannot see beyond skin color when judging someone.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post:

American politics always has surprises, but things have been especially unpredictable since President Obama took office. First, few observers were prepared for the tea party movement, which ousted several veteran GOP  lawmakers, replaced them with more radically conservative newcomers, and helped the Republican Party win control of the House of Representatives in 2010.

"That left a lot of analysts slack-jawed, wondering: What was this latent force that drove the emergence of this movement?" said Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford University.
Then, of course, there was Donald Trump.

Willer speculates that one thing connecting these two political earthquakes might be white voters' unconscious racial biases. In a series of psychological experiments between 2011 and 2015, he showed how hostility toward people with darker skin and perceived racial threats can influence white support for the tea party. He and his colleagues published a draft of a paper on their findings online last week — some of the most direct evidence of the importance of race to the conservative resurgence during Obama's presidency.

First, the researchers randomly sorted subjects into two groups and showed them a series of pictures of celebrities, including digitally altered images of the commander in chief. One group saw a version in which Obama's skin had been lightened, while in the other version, his skin had been darkened.

Among the 255 white subjects, though, those in the group that had seen the darkened portrait were almost twice as likely to say they supported the movement.

The result suggests that some white Americans are more likely to oppose Obama solely because of the shade of his skin. For them, the reality that someone with a dark complexion occupies the nation's highest office could be a source of unease.

Past polls and experiments have also suggested that the president's race has motivated opposition to his policies.

For example, psychologist David Sears and political scientist Michael Tesler found that many white voters were willing to support white liberal politicians such as President Clinton and Secretary of State John Kerry when they were candidates for president, but voted against Obama. Since Clinton, Kerry and Obama all espoused a similar ideology, the pair surmised that Obama must have been less popular because he is black.

Previous research has shown that white Americans tend to see the trend toward racial equity as a kind of competition, in which one group's loss must be another group's gain. In particular, research shows, economic distress can exacerbate racial biases, since they give members of the dominant group the mistaken impression their relative position is endangered. White Americans get "the sense that they have a shrinking piece of a pie that is itself shrinking," Willer explained.

With the second report, Willer and his colleagues showed that their subjects reinforced this unconscious bias and produced greater levels of white support for the tea party . . . 

The take away?  That calling Trump supporters racist losers may be closer to the truth than we realized. Also, don't forget that 85% of the Tea Party identifies as conservative Christian - hatred of those deemed "other" and hypocrisy are the hallmarks of these folks.

Trump South Carolina Rally Has Shades of Nazi Behavior

I and others have accused Donald Trump of fascist behavior and policies.  Now, at a rally in North Augusta, South Carolina yesterday, Trump brought on stage thugs in attendance at the rally who engaged in behavior reminiscent of what Nazi goons did to opponents at rallies early in the rise of the Nazi Party.  What happened?  Attendees at the Trump rally roughed up a young protester who had a handmade sign denouncing Trump’s stance on immigration.   Like Hitler and his brown shirts, Trump and his followers deal with critics by engaging in physical and verbal violence.  Don't like people and/or what they have to say, the solution is to beat them up physically.  I would remind readers that a third of Trump supporters would ban gays from entering America.  Are American gays a future target of Trumps goons?  Think Progress looks at this frightening behavior.  Here are highlights:

It’s become a familiar pattern at Donald Trump rallies: a protester or several interrupt the Republican front runner, angry Trump supporters physically and verbally attack, and the offenders are escorted out by security officers. 

Tuesday’s rowdy rally in North Augusta, South Carolina brought a twist to the formula. After Trump supporters ripped away a handmade sign denouncing Trump’s stance on immigration from young protester Thomas Hill, Trump honored the men by inviting them on stage.

“I saw fists start to fly,” Trump said, referring to the protester as a “rough cookie.”  He then praised the supporters who physically confronted him, saying, “I love people with courage.”

After the protester was escorted out by security, flipping his middle fingers to the crowd as he left, Trump asked those who “took action” against him to join him on stage. After hugging the men and praising them, Trump gave them the microphone. 

“Do not let them intimidate you,” the first supporter told the roaring crowd, referring to the lone protester. “They will say anything, they will do anything to keep in power. We don’t need who is in there now. We need to get some fresh bunch up there, some fresh blood.”

The second, an Richmond County police officer and Iraq War veteran, added: “If it wasn’t for Mr. Trump right here, I don’t think any of us would have the voice that we have. This is the only man who is really going to bring America back.”

Though in recent weeks the Trump has played a recorded warning at his rallies telling supporters not to “touch or harm” protesters, the candidate has previously praised those who have acted violently.
In August, after two men inspired by Trump’s rhetoric beat and urinated on a homeless Latino man, Trump told reporters that his supporters tend to be “passionate” and said, “They love this country and they want this country to be great again.” 

Race - The Real Reason the Republican Party is Imploding

I have said it before and I will say it again: the descent of the Republican Party began when white, racist, Christofascists were cynically welcomed in to the party by the so-called GOP establishment which put short term electoral victories over the long term future and viability of the party.  These angry white conservative Christians - many of whom, particularly in the South view the Jim Crow era a golden period in America - have become a cancer in the GOP that has proved to be just as hard to eradicate as the AIDS virus.   A piece in Salon looks at the role racism has played in the coming implosion of the GOP.  Here are highlights:

Republicans in the House are reportedly no closer to finding John Boehner’s successor. As a matter of fact, things have gotten so bad that the conservative establishment is begging Rep. Paul Ryan to take the job. He says he’d rather not.

But over the weekend, it started to look like Ryan may not have to resign himself to the miserable fate of being one of the most powerful people on the planet — at least not yet. Because according to reports which first emanated from Breitbart.com and other tribunes of the far right, but which have since been corroborated by the New York Times and others, even Ryan may not be conservative enough to please the 30-40 extremists who felled Boehner, thwarted McCarthy, and call themselves members of the House Freedom Caucus.

 

ADVERTISING

Yes, that’s right: The Republican Party is now beholden to a faction so zealously reactionary that Paul “Ayn Rand is the reason I got involved in public service” Ryan is, in its reckoning, much too far to the left.

[R]ecognizing the problem is the easy part. The harder part is acknowledging where it comes from. Brooks chalks the GOP’s militancy up to 30 years of “rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions and philosophical betrayals” and suggests that Republicans are “addicted to a crisis mentality.”  . . . . 

No, as is so often true in American politics, the problem is race.

Some hardliners pay lip service to his supporting the 2008 bailouts when explaining their opposition to Ryan. But if you follow the far-right press, or listen to rank-and-file activists, it’s blindingly obvious that conservatives’ real problem with Paul Ryan is that he not only supports comprehensive immigration reform, but supports higher levels of overall immigration, too. “There’s nobody in the Republican Party who could be worse than Paul Ryan,” said Roy Beck, a leading “immigration control” activist, to Breitbart. “Open Borders is in his ideological DNA. That’s the terrifying thing.”

Where they break from the rest of the political establishment is in their analysis; that apocalyptic stuff about the end of the republic, the New Black Panther Party, and immigration being akin to “invasion.”

But that’s not craziness; that’s racism. They’re different. So if Brooks and others really want to know how this dysfunction got started, they’ll have to look back further. Before the Tea Party, and before Paul Ryan was even born. They’ll have to examine the roots of today’s Republican Party. I’d recommend they start with Richard Nixon and the presidential campaign of 1968.

As noted before, the GOP has become so extreme on race that I often wonder why they do not hand out KKK robes at the beginning of GOP city and county committee meetings.  The GOP was not always like this - certainly not in the more distant years past when I was on the Virginia Beach City Committee for the GOP.

Texas is Turning Blue - GOP Panic to Follow

Demographic changes are overtaking America just as surely as climate changes is overtaking the Earth.  Yet in both cases, today's Republican Party denies the reality of both.   As a former Republican I remain dumb founded that the GOP has no long term plan for dealing with the changing demographic reality.  They simply cannot disenfranchise enough people to stop the coming tide of voters who are not angry whites clinging to fond memories of Jim Crow and unquestioned white privilege.  Yet, as the current crop of would be GOP presidential nominees reveals, the  GOP still thinks it can run campaigns aimed solely at the shrinking angry vote voter pool. Even states like Texas (where GOP batshitery is currently off the charts)  will eventually tip away from the GOP as noted in a piece in addictingfo.org.   Here are highlights:

Texas is, indisputably, the corner stone of Republican presidential ambitions. Should Texas, with its 38 electoral votes, go blue, the chances of a Republican ever setting up shop in the Oval Office again are bleak.

If Texas had voted blue in 2012, Mitt Romney could have won the entire West Coast including California and still lost.

THAT’S how important Texas is to Republicans. There is almost no path to victory without it. If Texas had voted blue in 2000 or 2004, George W. Bush would have lost. This is a weakness unique to Republicans. For instance, if California with its 55 electoral votes (by far the largest chunk of the electorate) had voted red in 2008 or 2012, Obama still would have won.

The bottom line is that if Texas turns blue, or even purple, Republicans are completely and utterly screwed. But that’s exactly what is happening:

Houston is not merely more Hispanic; the fastest-growing ethnic group is Asian. The kimchi taco is a hit. Some 90 languages are spoken. The city government will soon publish information in six languages. And 98 percent of the population growth in the first 10 years of this century has been nonwhite.

This diversity is rippling out to the far suburbs, counties that have long been white and Republican — and vital for winning statewide office. The most diverse part of the Houston region is now Missouri City, which straddles Brazoria County and Fort Bend County on the city’s southwestern edge and is filling with Hispanics, Asians and African-Americans seeking bigger homes and better schools.

The same trends are found in the Texas Triangle, an increasingly dense region bounded by Houston, San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth. It includes less than 20 percent of the state’s land but all its biggest cities. Conservative politicians do poorly in these settings.

The only way Republicans can respond to this is with increasingly more extreme voter suppression laws but even that won’t work for very long. It also risks a massive backlash by liberal and independent voters.

The other problem for Republicans is that, as the minority residents start spreading out into the suburbs, the not-at-all-racist white conservative residents are going to flee. White Flight will decimate traditional Republican strongholds, further weakening the GOP’s grip on Texas.

It might not happen this year, or even in the next ten, but the writing is on the wall: A Republican Party that keeps only pandering to the whitest and most racist of Texans will lose the entire state and any chance of putting another Bush in the White House.

The same demographic changes are happening in Virginia and just as in Texas, the Virginia GOP's only response is to double down on racism and religious extremism and the Republican brand more toxic in the eyes of the increasingly diverse population.  I do not understand the shortsightedness. 

Cuckservative - Right Wingers Who Claim Their Country is Being Stolen

Haven't heard the term "Cuckservative" until now?  Candidly, neither did I since I don't frequent white nationalist circles.  But as a piece in Salon discusses, the term is becoming increasingly popular among the GOP base and it use to describe conservative who are allowing "their country" to be stolen from them by the usual targets of Christofascists and the white supremacy crowd but are too cowardly to do anything about it.  Sadly, it is part and parcel with the Republican Party's slide to insanity and open racism.  Here are excerpts from the piece:

In a recent article at Salon, Joan Walsh did an excellent job in navigating the political effluence that is the American right’s newborn obsession with “cuckservatives.”  There, she noted how:

“Cuckservative” started showing up in my Twitter mentions last week, after I suggested Donald Trump supporters might not be the brightest bulbs. As I clicked around, I came to a shocking conclusion: I’ve been uncharacteristically downplaying the amount of racism and misogyny powering the right today. The spread of the epithet “cuckservative” is a sign that the crudest psycho-sexual insecurity animates the far right.

“Cuckservative,” you see, is short for a cuckolded conservative. It’s not about a Republican whose wife is cheating on him, but one whose country is being taken away from him, and who’s too cowardly to do anything about it.

OK, that’s gross and sexist enough already, but there’s more. It apparently comes from a kind of pornography known as “cuck,” in which a white husband, either in shame or lust, watches his wife be taken by a black man. Lewis explains it this way: “A cuckservative is, therefore, a race traitor.”

White supremacists have reinforced the racial intent of the “cuckservative” narrative.   . . .  But, as Walsh explains, usage the word hasn’t been limited to white nationalist circles:

Rush Limbaugh helped spread the term to the mainstream when he praised Trump like this: “If Trump were your average, ordinary, cuckolded Republican, he would have apologized by now, and he would have begged for forgiveness, and he would have gone away.”

At present, “cuckservative” is just one more signal of how the contemporary Republican Party and movement conservatism have become a carnival-like human zoo fueled by the talk-radio echo chamber, one where extremism is now mainstream, and the politically adolescent and immature obsessions of “men’s rights” victimologists — with their “alpha males” and “cuckolding” anxieties — are considered reasonable and respectable points of view.

The convergence of white supremacy and conservatism in the modern Republican Party — spurred in part by a renaissance of toxic white masculinity — has produced what, in the moment, appears to be a series of never-ending climaxes and crescendos wherein new levels of absurdity and paranoia replace previous peaks once thought unattainable. The extreme has become the new normal for mainstream American conservatism.

 

[T]his camp of aggrieved and imperiled white men, drunk on toxic white masculinity, are terrified of their supposed status as “victims” in a more inclusive and cosmopolitan 21st century America. Whereas cuckolding has its foundations in eroticism, the term “cuckservative” has evolved from a related, but ultimately very different, psychosexual fixation: racialized castration anxieties.

 

White men saw themselves as the naturally dominant group in the United States from its founding to the present. The idea of white male privilege as “normal” and a given remains inexorably compelling — especially to the “angry” and aggrieved white men who are the base of the Republican Party in the post-civil rights era.

 

The Republican Party’s fetish for guns, its knee-jerk defense of white-on-black-and-brown police violence and abuse, and its theocratic Christian politics also have many wellsprings in the American South. The right’s desperate efforts to control women’s bodies and reproductive freedoms are likewise a legacy and reminder of how white men’s power has historically extended to their (supposed) ownership over women’s sexuality and health.

Thus, white male anxieties spoken to by those who authored and circulated the “cuckservative” meme are really just evoking a misdirected feeling by some white men that they have lost political power and potency — that they have been, so to speak, castrated.

Donald Trump - and GOP - Supporters Are Living in a Fantasy Land

I increasingly look at today's GOP and shake my head thinking WTF happened to a party that once embraced knowledge, intellect and rational thought.  But then I remember that the unwashed masses of Christofascists who have hijacked the party base and then suddenly the swamp fever that has gripped the GOP all make sense.  After all, these are the same folks who trust in the writings of unknown, ignorant Bronze Age herders to guide their lives and formulate their world view.  No wonder those supporting Donald Trump - and other GOP candidates - appear to be living in a fantasy land.  They ARE living in a fantasy land with little likelihood of coming to their senses anytime soon.  A piece in Salon looks at the fantasy world of these people and why Donald Trump is their pied piper.  Here are excerpts:

Even though I’m not a politician, I guess I committed a textbook Kinsley gaffe on “Hardball” yesterday, when I inadvertently told the truth about what I think of the 12 New Hampshire Republican voters Bloomberg assembled to explain the Donald Trump phenomenon. (You can watch, below.) I said they made me “sad,” and I made a comment about “the lowest common denominator” (more on what I meant in a minute) – and then my friend Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, had a lot of fun calling me an “elitist” and insisting people like me are why voters like that support Trump. Or something.

“They’re not thinking. They want to be entertained,” I asserted.

That’s a big mistake in mainstream journalism, where the Very Serious People insist we must respect what Trump’s voters represent.  I failed to keep up the Beltway fiction that we must take these voters seriously because they’re “frustrated” with Washington, and thus their irrational anger and weakness for slogans over solutions is a symptom of a grave political malady in The Age of Obama.

But actually listening to those voters, it’s hard to take much they said seriously. Their Trump praise frequently reflects their Obama disdain. . . and their support of Trump’s “solutions” makes no sense.

There’s a childlike wishful thinking in these voters’ belief that Trump can solve all the country’s problems by being “tough.” And that’s what I meant with my reference to the “lowest common denominator” – I actually wasn’t referring to the voters themselves (in fact, that makes no sense); I was talking about the solutions they seem to embrace for the country’s woes. Pining for a “tough” guy who’s done well in “business” but is “one of us” is simplistic and a little scary. Most of that New Hampshire focus group seemed to want a daddy, not a president.

Steele put his finger on a dilemma – for his party. When people hear criticism of Trump’s voters, he explained, “whether it’s from the media or Republicans in the party, they go, ‘This guy,’ as the woman said, ‘he’s speaking to me. I may not agree with everything he’s saying, but he’s one of us. He’s a billionaire, but he’s one of us.’” That’s a genuine problem for Republican elites who disdain Trump but don’t want to see him mount a third party run if he doesn’t get the nomination. 

[S]omething less than 10 percent of eligible American voters currently say they support Donald Trump. That isn’t a mandate; that’s the same old angry, noisy, delusional minority of voters that persistently afflicts American politics. I’m not going to apologize for telling the truth: their support of Trump makes me sad, because their reasoning shows little or no grasp of what it takes to make political change in this country.

The Democrats' Demographic Advantage

Yet another article in The Atlantic looks at the growing demographic challenges faced by the Republican Party in 2016 and beyond.  Despite all the analysis that shows that angry conservative white voters are shrinking as a portion of the voting population as non-black minority groups and college educated whites - who tend to vote Democrat - are growing segments of the overall population, the GOP at the federal and state level remains in a deadly embrace with Christofascists and runs the risk of becoming a permanent minority party. As a political activist of going on 3 decades, one has to wonder why the GOP remains in denial about the changing national population and the growing revulsion more and more voters hols for the extremists of the Christian Right.   Here are article highlights:

Looking at the race through a historical lens, the odds would seem stacked against Hillary Clinton (assuming that she is the Democratic nominee). In the post-World War II era, only six times has one party held the presidency for two consecutive terms, and only once has that party kept the White House for a third—a pattern that reflects what I call the “time for a change” voter dynamic. In fact, the last Democratic president directly elected to succeed another was James Buchanan, in 1856; he followed Franklin Pierce.

But looking through a demographic lens, the modern GOP's increasing reliance on a shrinking pool of older, white, and working-class voters—and its failure to attract nonwhite voters—would seem to present an enormous obstacle to the eventual Republican nominee. In 1980, when nonwhite voters were just 12 percent of the electorate, Ronald Reagan won 56 percent of white voters and was elected in a landslide. But in 2012, when nonwhite voters accounted for 28 percent of the electorate, Mitt Romney took 59 percent of white voters—and lost the presidential race by 4 percentage points. Without a total brand makeover, how can Republicans expect to prevail with an even more diverse electorate in 2016?

Cook Political Report House Editor David Wasserman recently crunched census and exit-poll data to build a statistical model of the likely electorate in each state, breaking down voters into five distinct groups: 1) whites with college degrees, 2) whites without college degrees, 3) African-Americans, 4) Latinos, and 5) Asians/others.

First, the good news for Democrats: If the electorate evolves in sync with the Census Bureau's estimates of the adult citizen population (admittedly, a big if), the white share of the electorate would drop from 72 percent in 2012 to 70 percent in 2016; the African American share would remain stable at 13 percent; the Latino portion would grow from 10 percent to 11 percent; and the Asian/other segment would increase from 5 percent to 6 percent. If the 2012 election had been held with that breakdown (keeping all other variables stable), President Obama would have won by 5.4 percentage points rather than by his actual 3.85-point margin.

In addition, the group with which the GOP does best—whites without college degrees—is the only one poised to shrink in 2016. President Obama won just 36 percent of these voters in 2012, while 42 percent of white voters with college degrees pulled the lever for him. But if the electorate changes in line with census estimates, the slice of college-educated whites will grow by 1 point, to 37 percent of all voters, while the portion of whites without degrees will shrink 3 points, to just 33 percent of the total. In other words, the GOP doesn't just have a growing problem with nonwhites; it has a shrinkage problem as well, as conservative white seniors are supplanted by college-educated millennials with different cultural attitudes. 

[T]he bottom line is that demographic trends, while helpful to Democrats, are no guarantee that the party will hold the White House beyond 2017. 

The GOP Must Destroy Donald Trump Before He Destroys It

With a new Reuters-Ipsos poll showing Donald trump running neck and neck with Jeb "Jebbie" Bush, the so-called GOP establishment is truly paying the price for having made the GOP a welcome haven for every religious extremist, white supremacist, and general lunatic - all of who seem to be rallying to Donald trump's birtherism, inflammatory anti-immigrant statements and slams of gay marriage (even though he's on his own 3rd marriage).   In the process, all of the hate and poison of the GOP base is being laid bear for the world to see despite continued :big tent bullshit" coming from the lips of those who would seek to do damage control.  Based on the GOP's history, few will speak against Trump and the party will be damaged, and deservedly so.  A piece in Salon looks at why the GOP needs to destroy Trump's candidacy.  Here are excerpts:

Slightly hunched over and surrounded by a forest of “Jeb!” signs and shouting supporters, Jeb Bush was pressed by a reporter about the bigoted, race-baiting comments made by leading GOP candidate, hotel mogul and kitsch peddler Donald Trump.  Jeb, seeming like he did not particularly relish the chance to answer this question, remarked, “I don’t assume that he thinks that every Mexican crossing the border is a rapist.”

Bush was holding back and making excuses.  Surely the Trump stunt, Bush figured, was meant to “inflame and incite and draw attention, which seems to be the organizing principle of his campaign.”  The coiffed king of bad taste did not represent the Republican Party, said Bush.  But is that really true?  Republican Party renegades can always tack to the far right.  It pays to do so.

Trump has been polling amazingly well.  Apparently his comments about drug-smuggling Mexicans, anchor babies, rapists and jobless chiselers have helped him with the crimson-red base of the party.  

Where is the outrage from other GOP candidates?  Some respond to Trump’s bomb throwing with little more than a shrug of the shoulders.  Others express the kind of dissatisfaction a suburbanite might register at crabgrass on the neighbor’s lawn.   

The establishment wing in the GOP has been pandering to, drawing on, and occasionally ignoring the smoke and fire of far-right opportunists, miscreants, racists demagogues in its ranks for decades now.  How the party has responded over the ages sheds some much needed historical light on the Trump debacle.

In the early 1950s President Dwight Eisenhower had his own Trump troubles in the hot mess of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.   . . . . Through it all President Eisenhower refused to take a firm public stand against the rabble-rousing red-baiter. . . . Lucky for the president, the Wisconsin senator finally met his demise. The Senate censured him for his recklessness and utter lack of ethics.  Three years later he died as a result of his raging alcoholism.

Picking up where Tailgunner Joe left off, the anti-communist John Birch Society fought mightily in the early 1960s to get America out of the UN. . . . In 1964, with Birchers running amok in the Cow Palace, many delegates zipped their lips rather than cast aspersions on the party’s far right fringe.  Barry Goldwater, who won the nomination in San Francisco, did little to distance his party from the hordes of treason screamers of the radical right.  Goldwater lost in one of the largest landslides in U.S. history.

Four years later the former Alabama governor and arch segregationist candidate George Wallace fought for the presidency as an ardent culture warrior. Wallace sunk to new depths of populist demagoguery. . . . . Republican candidates, perhaps in awe of Wallace’s tub-thumping, said little against the tiny former Golden Gloves champ.  If anything, other candidates like Richard Nixon were learning important lessons from Wallace’s School of Southern Populism.  The historian Dan Carter argues that Nixon drew skillfully on Wallace to craft a new Southern strategy.

And so it is much the same today, 46 years later.  As long as a large portion of conservative voters cheer with delight at Donald Trump’s grotesque, bigoted rants, the GOP will have to keep tacking to the right, or at least find some way to steal a little of Trump’s wind.  The front-runners  . . . .[will] tread carefully so as to not offend all those voters who see a criminal in every immigrant.

Rust-Belt Revivalists Can’t Save the GOP

While most Republicans remain in a frenetic race to out pander themselves to the Christofascist element in the GOP base, one cadre of the GOP believes the party's salvation lies in pandering to the most disgruntled elements of white working class voters in the hope that these efforts will boost voter turnout for this demographic and provide a deus ex machina in the 2016 presidential elections.  Conservative columnist Michael Gerson at the Washington Post calls these members of the GOP "Rust Belt Revivalists" and makes the case as to why this effort in the GOP is doomed to fail.  Here are column highlights:

Attempting to analyze political statements by Donald Trump is often a high dive into a shallow pool. But a number of conservative commentators are making the jump, discerning hidden virtues in his depiction of marauding immigrants intent on crime and rape. 

While finding Trump’s words “crude and reprehensible,” the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol thinks they summarize a “genuine concern about illegal immigrants.” “For all its crassness,” says National Review’s Rich Lowry, “Trump’s rant on immigration is closer to reality than the gauzy cliches of immigration romantics.” 

Some of this is surely an attempt to make the best of a bad situation, the equivalent of: “My, that gangrene is such a pleasing shade of green.”

One brand of Republican reformers — the Rust Belt revivalists — believes the GOP has been too dominated by corporate interests and needs to identify more directly with the economic frustrations of working-class voters. Trump is the cartoon version of this view — preaching protectionism and accusing immigrants of “destroying the fabric of the country.” But Rick Santorum makes a similar economic case, proposing to cut immigration by 25 percent as part of a plan (according to his Web site ) “to protect American workers from foreign labor that is taking jobs that Americans could otherwise hold.”  

In this strategy, there is an inherent tension between appealing to the white working class and appealing to immigrants. . . . the white working class remains the larger group of voters. A concentrated focus on their concerns, the argument goes, might open a path to victory through Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. 

Another group of reformers — the advocates of a demographic pivot — also believes the Republican Party is too closely identified with the boardroom and the country club. But they look at the declining percentage of white voters . . . and argue that the Republican coalition will need to be browner in order to win in places like Florida, Colorado and Nevada. 

It will come as no surprise that I view the arguments of the Rust Belt revivalists as less compelling and more dangerous. 

First, the effect of immigration on native-born wages, while not imaginary, is easily overstated. . . . The problems of the working class will not be solved by immigration restrictionism.

Second, the advocates of a demographic pivot, even if they are not currently right, are eventually right.  It may well be possible in the 2016 presidential election for Republicans to pump up the white vote enough to secure a victory. But we are reaching the natural limits of that strategy.

Third, the strategy of appealing to the white working class by criticizing immigration raises the risk of racial polarization. Enthusiasm for this approach sometimes has reasons other than economics. There can be ugliness beneath, as Trump demonstrates. 

Finally, a political appeal that encourages division would worsen the GOP’s main political problem: a durable impression that it does not care for the country as a whole. As the old Southern strategy fades, it would be a terrible mistake to replace it with a different form of fear and exclusion.

Republicans have an opportunity to craft an agenda of economic mobility — to reward work (through wage subsidies), strengthen families (with a larger child credit) and encourage skills (with education reform) — that could appeal to both the white working class and rising minority groups, instead of pitting them against each other.  It is the way that Republicans can win, and deserve to win.

I think Gerson is correct on his analysis of the "rustbelt revivalists, yet I suspect that they are the faction that will win out in the near term - or at least until the GOP has lost yet another presidential election cycle. 

New Poll: Clinton Extends Her Lead Over All Republican Candidates

As the Republican Party presidential campaign clown bus becomes increasingly crowded, two new polls should give sane Republicans (to the extent there are any left) pause.  One shows that despite the efforts of the far right noise machine, Hillary Clinton continues to hold a lead over every one of the clowns crowding the GOP clown car.  The other found that  55% of younger voters want the Democrats to maintain control of the White House.   The obvious take aways are (i) that huge efforts will be needed in 2016 to turn out younger voters, and (ii) the efforts to slime Hillary are not working so far.  Here are excerpts from two articles in Politicususa.com that look at the poll findings:

First, on Hillary's standing versus the GOP clowns:

A new NBC News poll reveals that the Republican attempts to stop Hillary Clinton have failed as the Democratic frontrunner leads every Republican presidential candidate.

According to NBC News:

In the new NBC/WSJ poll, Clinton’s favorable/unfavorable rating stands at 42 positive, 42 negative (even) – down from 44 percent positive, 36 percent negative in March (+8).

Still, that break-even rating exceeds the fav/unfav scores for Republicans Marco Rubio (22 percent positive, 23 percent negative), Scott Walker (15 percent positive, 17 percent negative), Rand Paul (23 percent positive, 28 percent negative) and Jeb Bush (23 percent positive, 36 percent negative).

….

And looking ahead to the general election, Clinton leads Bush, the former Florida governor, by six points (49 percent to 43 percent); Rubio, the Florida senator, by another six points (49 percent to 43 percent); and Walker, the Wisconsin governor by 10 (50 percent to 40 percent).  The Republican presidential candidate in the poll who comes closest to Clinton is Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., 47 percent to 43 percent.

Clinton remains more popular than any of her potential Republican opponents because what the Republican Party stands for is very unpopular.

In terms of younger voters, there is this:

A survey from the Harvard University Institute of Politics contained good news for Democrats. The younger voters that were a key part of President Obama’s victories solidly want to keep a Democrat in the White House.

The survey found that Obama coalition is going to keep their support with Democrats in 2016:

Overall, young Americans prefer that a Democrat (55%) win the White House over a Republican (40%) in the 2016 race for president, a view held within the younger (18-24 year-olds – 53%: Democrat; 41%: Republican) and older (25-29 year-olds – 57%: Democrat; 39%: Republican) segments of the age-group. ‎This view is stronger among young African-Americans (87%: Democrat; 8%: Republican) and young Hispanics (68%: Democrat; 27%: Republican).

Younger voters support Hillary Clinton over Elizabeth Warren 47%-11%. Clinton leads Bernie Sanders 47%-1%. No Republican candidate was able to break 10% support with younger Republicans. Ben Carson (10%), Rand Paul (8%), Jeb Bush (7%), Mike Huckabee (7%), and Scott Walker (5%) were the top five Republicans.

In many ways, the findings of this latter survey should come as no surprise since the GOP's sole focus is pandering to aging angry white voters who cling to beliefs rejected by younger and/or educated voters.