Seriously, Is The Republican Party Cracking Up?

Yesterday everyone was talking about the Republican plan in the North Carolina legislature to establish a state religion, something clearly prohibited by the Constitution, not to mention centuries of common practice in the U.S. People were scratching their heads and wondering if the proposal was just something from Tea Party crackpots with no influence. Well one of the sponsors, Edgar Starnes, is certainly a Tea Party crackpot but he's serving his 10th term and he's the GOP Majority Leader of the House. He represents tiny, somewhat backward Caldwell County which voted 23,069- 10,795 for Romney over Obama in November. Starnes claims North Carolina can enshrine a state religion if it wants to.

Guess what; Oklahoma has even more cracked Republicans than North Carolina, loons concerned with UN black helicopters. And then there was Louie Gohmert, an actual U.S. Congressman from the saddest part of Texas, who claimed-- and with a straight face-- that gun control is a slippery slope that leads right to gay sex and bestiality

It must be pretty stressful being a Republican. The voting public doesn't agree with any of their core positions and voters don't trust their hands on the levers of power. A new poll from Quinnipiac had nothing but bad news for them.

Among all American voters, the Democratic Party is less disliked than the GOP: the Democrats get a negative 38 - 44 percent favorability, compared to a negative 28 - 52 percent for the Republicans. The Tea Party gets a negative 24 - 43 percent.

Voters also give Republicans in Congress a negative 19 - 71 percent job approval, compared to a negative 34 - 59 percent for the Democrats in Congress.

"The Republican brand is essentially in the toilet these days, but it's worth remembering the Democrats faced a similar situation in the late 1980s and got their house in order and returned to power in short order," said [Assistant Director Peter] Brown.

But the trend is far from favorable for them. Last July when the survey asked who they would vote for for Congress, a generic Republican or a generic Democrat, 43% picked a Democrat and 40% picked a Republican. This month the Democrat still has 43% support. But the Republic support has sunk to 35%, enough to make up for the gerrymander advantage. Among voters with a college degree it's even worse for the GOP. 31% favor a Republican and 44% favor a Democrat. and asked whether the congressional Republicans are doing a good job, only 19% said yes. Even among Republican voters only 34% felt they were doing a good job while 57% said they disapprove of the job Congressional Republicans are doing. No demographic approved-- not even white born-again evangelical voters, 63% disapproving. When asked if the Republicans Party "cares about the needs and problems of people like you or not," 59% said NOT. Among these same respondents 59% said that the Democratic Party does care.

Meanwhile another new poll just out, this one from Marist, shows the GOP severely out of sync with American voters on gun control. Voters don't only want background checks, they want assault weapons banned entirely. Six in 10 respondents-- including 83% of Democrats, 43% of gun owners and 37% of Republicans-- believe that the laws covering gun sales should be stricter. 87% of Americans support background checks for private gun sales and sales at gun shows, and 59% favor legislation that would ban the sale of assault weapons. The same poll also shows the public rejecting the Republican Austerity Agenda.

[T]he Morning Joe/Marist survey shows that Americans-- by nearly a 2-to-1 margin-- want President Barack Obama and Congress to make job creation their top priority (64 percent) instead of deficit reduction (33 percent).

Those who prefer Washington’s political leaders to emphasize job creation include 76 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Republicans; a narrow majority of Republican respondents (51 percent) want the focus to be on deficit reduction.

Also, Obama edges congressional Republicans by four percentage points, 44 percent to 40 percent, on the question of who has a better approach to deal with the federal budget deficit.

But the president’s approach to deficit reduction-- calling for a combination of spending cuts and increased tax revenues-- is more popular than the Republicans’ cuts-only approach.

Forty-two percent of respondents prefer a mixture of spending cuts (including to entitlement programs) and revenue increases; 35 percent pick increasing mostly revenue; and just 17 percent choose mostly cutting government spending (including to programs like Medicare and Medicaid).

Still, an analysis from Think Progress, it appears that a landslide victory in the House would--  thanks to gerrymandering-- only yield a 5 seat majority. Which means Democrats would, once again, be at the mercy of useless Blue Dogs and New Dems who are exactly as corrupted by corporate money as the Republicans are.

According to a Quinnipiac poll released today, if the election were held today 43 percent of the electorate would support a Democratic U.S. House candidate, as opposed to just 35 percent who would back a Republican. That 8 point lead for Democrats is significantly more than the GOP’s margin of victory during the 2010 Republican wave election (6.6 percent) and even more that the Democratic margin of victory during the 2006 wave (7.9 percent)-- when Democrats were bolstered by both an unpopular Republican president and a failing war in Iraq. And yet, if Democrats succeed in maintaining this substantial lead through next year’s congressional election, they will likely emerge with a tiny majority of just 5 seats... Republican gerrymandering was so successful during the last redistricting cycle that Democrats would likely need to win the national popular vote by more than 7 points in order to win the barest of majorities in the House.

As Greg Sargent put it in his Washington Post column, "public opinion among Republicans is increasingly isolated and drifting away from the rest of the electorate. You see this on pretty much every major issue facing the country." He offers lot of examples-- 57% of Americans support a pathway to citizenship for immigrants already here, something 60% of Republicans oppose. 58% of voters (and 62% of Independents) believe the time has come for marriage equality. Only 34% of Republican voters agree, which makes it difficult even for evolved Members to support something that everyone in the country but the crazy GOP base is favoring.

So while you have the RNC vacillating between rebranding and claiming President Obama is plotting infanticide, Democrats need only point to the results of Tuesday's runoff in South Carolina to show the American people that there really is something seriously wrong with Republicans.