Why Don't Republicans Like Obama? No, Really

The other day we looked at how the Republicans Party has-- since Nixon launched the Southern Strategy-- been taken over by southern conservatives. More than a few of the southern racists we wrote about are unaware that their politics (and emotions) are motivated by uncontrollable racism. Don't scoff. As I mentioned last week, I'm in the middle of reading Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences by 3 serious academics, John Hibbing, Kevin Smith, and John Alford. A premise of their work is that "buried in many people and operating largely outside the realm of conscious thought are forces inclining us toward liberal or conservative political convictions. Our biology predisposes us to see and understand the world in different ways, not always reason and the careful consideration of facts. These predispositions are in turn responsible for a significant portion of the political and ideological conflict that marks human history." Before I give you a chunk of their writing and go on to make my point, watch this video about Mississippi Republicans one more time:



Gottfried Leibniz, a 17th century mathematician and scientist was the father of a theory Hibbing, Smith an Alford writing about: the baloney generator:

If you need examples of people’s physiology affecting their attitudes and behavior even when they think they are being rational, consider that job applicant resumes viewed on heavy clipboards are generally judged to be more worthy than identical resumes on lighter clipboards; that holding a warm or hot drink can influence whether opinions of other people are positive or negative; and that when people reach out to pick up an orange while smelling strawberries they unwittingly spread their fingers less widely-- as if they were picking up a strawberry rather than an orange. People sitting in a messy, smelly room tend to make harsher moral judgments than those who are in a neutral room; disgusting ambient odors also increase expressed dislike of gays. [Think back to the messy smelly room in Mississippi and the Republican fella with the dental problems.]

Individuals being sentenced by a judge should hope it is right after a rest break rather than after several cases have been heard because judges’ sentencing practices are measurably more lenient when they are fresh. Sitting on a hatred uncomfortable chair leads people to be less flexible in their stances than if they are seated on a soft, comfortable chair, and people reminded of physical cleansing, perhaps by being located near a hand sanitizer, are more likely to render stern judgments than those who were not given such a reminder. People can even be made to change their moral judgments as a result of hypnotic suggestion.

In all these cases the baloney generator can produce a convincing case that the pertinent decision was made on the merits rather than as a result of irrelevant factors.

People actively deny that a chunky clipboard has anything to do with their assessment of job applicants or that a funky pong has anything to do with their moral judgments. Judges certainly refuse to believe that the length of time since their last break has anything to do with their sentencing decisions: after all, they are distributing objective justice. Leibniz had it right, though, and the baloney generator is full of it. The way we respond-- biologically, physiologically, unconsciously, and in many cases unwittingly-- to our environments influences attitudes and behavior. People don’t like to hear that since they much prefer to believe their decisions and opinions are rational rather than rationalized.

This desire to believe we are rational is certainly the case when it comes to the arena of politics where an unwillingness to acknowledge the role of extraneous and possibly subconscious forces is especially strong. Many pretend that politics is a product of citizens taking their civic obligations seriously, sifting through political messages and information, and then carefully and deliberately considering the candidates and issue positions before making a consciously informed decision. Doubtful. In truth, people’s political judgments are affected by all kinds of factors they assume to be wholly irrelevant.

…Responses to political stimuli are animated by emotional and not-always-conscious bodily processes. Political scientist Milt Lodge studies “hot cognition” or “automaticity.” His research shows that people tag familiar objects and concepts with an emotional response and that political stimuli such as a picture of Sarah Palin or the word “Obamacare” are particularly likely to generate emotional, or affective (and therefore physiologically detectable) responses. In fact, Lodge and his colleague Charles Taber claim that “all political leaders, groups, issues, symbols, and ideas previously thought about and evaluated in the past become affectively charged—positively or negatively.” Responses to a range of individual concepts and objects frequently become integrated in a network that can be thought of as the tangible manifestation of a broader political ideology.

The fact that extraneous, sub-threshold forces shape political orientations and actions makes it possible for individual variation in non-political variables to affect politics. If hotter ambient temperatures in a room increase acceptance of global warming, maybe people whose internal thermostats incline them to feeling hot are also more likely to be accepting of global warming. Likewise, sensitivity to clutter and disorder, to smell, to disgust, to threats all become potentially relevant to political views. Since elements of these sensitivities are outside of conscious awareness, it becomes possible that political views are shaped by psychological and physiological patterns.

Objectively, Obama has been a pretty good, moderate Republican president. Just about the first thing he did when he got into office was to lower taxes on small businesses and the middle class (like his Making Work Pay tax credit). Americans are enjoying the lowest level of taxation since… well a lower level than under Reagan or either Bush. And as for budget reduction, the Republican base should be worshipping Obama. He's the best Republican any of them have seen in their lifetimes and has cut the enormous deficits left by George Bush in half. The deficit is falling the fastest it has in 6 decades. And the federal government has been shrinking. Bush II grew public sector jobs by close to 2 million employees. Obama cut it by nearly a million.

So we can all agree that the Republicans got the best president they could have possibly hoped for, right? Oh, sure. That's not what they see when they look at him. You know what they see? So here's where we turn to a brilliant mash-up from the NY Times by Tom Edsall and Frank Wilkinson. (This is the important part of the post.)

These are extraordinary times. The depth and strength of voters’ conviction that their opponents are determined to destroy their way of life has rarely been matched, perhaps only by the mood of the South in the years leading up to the Civil War.

In a recent column for Bloomberg View, my friend Frank Wilkinson put together a concise explanation:

A lot of Americans were not ready for a mixed-race president. They weren’t ready for gay marriage. They weren’t ready for the wave of legal and illegal immigration that redefined American demographics over the past two or three decades, bringing in lots of nonwhites. They weren’t ready-- who was?-- for the brutal effects of globalization on working- and middle-class Americans or the devastating fallout from the financial crisis.

Their representatives didn’t stop Obamacare. And their side didn’t “take back America” in 2012 as Fox News and conservative radio personalities led them to believe they would. They feel the culture is running away from them (and they’re mostly right). They lack the power to control their own government. But they still have just enough to shut it down.


Animosity towards the federal government has been intensifying at a stunning rate. In a survey released on Sept. 23, Gallup found that the percentage of Republicans saying the federal government has too much power-- 81 percent-- had reached a record-setting level.

The movement to the right on the part of the Republican electorate can be seen in Gallup surveys calculating that the percentage of Republicans who identify themselves as conservative grew between 2002 and 2010 by 10 percentage points, from 62 to 72 percent. During the same period, the percentage of Republicans who identify themselves as moderates fell from 31 to 23 percent.

These trends date back to the 1970s. Surveys conducted by American National Election Studies found that the percentage of self-described conservative Republicans rose from 42 in 1972 to 65 percent in 2008, while the percentage of moderate Republicans fell from 26 to 16 percent. Liberal Republicans-- remember them?-- fell from 10 to 4 percent.

Take the findings of a Pew Research Center survey released four weeks ago. They show that discontent with Republican House and Senate leaders runs deep among Republican primary voters: two-thirds of them disapprove of their party’s Congressional leadership-- John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, and Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader.

Sometimes you have to turn to the know-your-enemy people to understand what’s going on. The Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner is one of the keenest observers of the contemporary Republican electorate. He is conducting an ongoing study called the “The Republican Party Project” for the liberal non-profit organization Democracy Corps. Greenberg’s premise is that “you cannot understand the government shutdown unless you understand the G.O.P. from the inside.”

Greenberg puts Republicans into three categories (Figure 1): evangelical and religiously observant voters (47 percent); libertarian-leaning Tea Party supporters (22 percent); and moderates (25 percent).

Last week Greenberg released the results of six focus groups conducted with evangelical and other religiously observant Republicans (in Roanoke and Colorado Springs), Tea Party supporters who are not evangelicals (Raleigh and Roanoke), and moderate Republicans (Raleigh and Colorado Springs).

One of the key factors pushing Republicans to extremes, according to Greenberg’s report, is the intensity of animosity toward Obama. This animosity among participants in all six focus groups is reflected in Figure 2, which represents a “word cloud” of focus group references to the president, with the size of each word in the cloud proportional to the frequency with which it was used.

In the six focus groups of Republican voters, according to Greenberg’s report, “few explicitly talk about Obama in racial terms,” but

the base supporters are very conscious of being white in a country with growing minorities. Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities. Race remains very much alive in the politics of the Republican Party.

Voters like this, according to the report, are convinced they have lost the larger battle:

While many voters, including plenty of Democrats, question whether Obama is succeeding and getting his agenda done, Republicans think he has won. The country as a whole may think gridlock has triumphed, particularly in the midst of a Republican-led government shutdown, but Republicans see a president who has fooled and manipulated the public, lied, and gotten his secret socialist-Marxist agenda done. Republicans and their kind of Americans are losing.

In his report for the Democracy Corps, Greenberg describes the Republican base electorate as fearful of being strategically outmaneuvered:

They think they face a victorious Democratic Party that is intent on expanding government to increase dependency and therefore electoral support. It starts with food stamps and unemployment benefits; expands further if you legalize the illegals; but insuring the uninsured dramatically grows those dependent on government. They believe this is an electoral strategy-- not just a political ideology or economic philosophy. If Obamacare happens, the Republican Party may be lost, in their view.

Conservative troops blame moderate Republican for what they see as Democratic victories. The Republican base

thinks they are losing politically and losing control of the country-- and their starting reaction is “worried,” “discouraged,” “scared,” and “concerned” about the direction of the country-- and a little powerless to change course. They think Obama has imposed his agenda, while Republicans in D.C. let him get away with it.

Figure 3 represents a second word cloud generated by Greenberg’s data showing which words came up most often in all six focus groups:

Greenberg’s study found that in the view of many, if not most, Republicans

the Democratic Party exists to create programs and dependency-- the food stamp hammock, entitlements, the 47 percent. And on the horizon-- comprehensive immigration reform and Obamacare. Citizenship for 12 million illegals and tens of million getting free health care is the end of the road.

“These voters think they are losing the country,” Greenberg said during an Oct. 3 conference call with reporters.

Among Greenberg’s other findings from his focus groups:

•The participants “are very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority.”
•Republican voters are threatened by Obama and the Democratic Party, but they are angry at their own party leaders. “The problem in D.C. is not gridlock; Obama has won; the problem is Republicans failing to stop him.”
•Together, evangelicals and Tea Party supporters comprise more than half the party. Moderates, about a quarter of Republicans, “are very conscious of being illegitimate within their own party.”

The evangelical and Tea Party wings of the Republican Party combine into a clear majority of Republican voters, and, according to Greenberg, they have a mutually reinforcing relationship:

Social issues are central for Evangelicals and they feel a deep sense of cultural and political loss. They believe their towns, communities, and schools are suffering from a deep “culture rot” that has invaded from the outside. The central focus here is homosexuality, but also the decline of homogenous small towns. They like the Tea Party because they stand up to the Democrats.

Tea Party supporters, according to Greenberg’s research, have a more libertarian edge but their worldview is compatible with the evangelical agenda:

Big government, Obama, the loss of liberty, and decline of responsibility are central to the Tea Party worldview. Obama’s America is an unmitigated evil based on big government, regulations, and dependency. They are not focused on social issues at all. They like the Tea Party because it is getting “back to basics” and believe it has the potential to reshape the G.O.P.

John Boehner is just the kind of Republican leader the hard right dislikes-- a dealmaker, a compromiser. The Republican primary electorate, with its hold on a solid block of Republican representatives and its ability to recruit and promote challengers, now has Boehner trapped. Personally inclined to find his way out of the face-to-face confrontation-- he is, after all, a career politician loathe to shut down the government-- Boehner has been forced into a confrontation, with less and less room for negotiation with his own party’s warring flanks and with Democrats.

Two days after Obama’s re-election, when Republicans lost eight seats but retained their House majority (232 to 200, with three vacancies), Boehner was asked by Diane Sawyer on ABC, “You have said next year that you would repeal the healthcare vote. That’s still your mission?” Boehner replied: “Well, I think the election changes that. It’s pretty clear that the president was reelected, Obamacare is the law of the land.”

That same day, Michael O’Brien of NBC News suggested that

The Speaker’s pronouncement, if nothing else, signifies a pivot away from Republicans’ efforts to showcase for conservatives their doggedness in looking to repeal Obamacare.

Nearly a year later, on Oct. 6, Boehner admitted that he had been forced to capitulate by constituent pressures on Republican members of the House. Appearing again on ABC, this time with George Stephanopoulos, Boehner said, “I and my members decided the threat of Obamacare and what was happening was so important that it was time for us to take a stand.”

Stephanopoulos asked: “Did you decide it or was it decided for you?” Boehner’s answer:

I, working with my members, decided to do this in a unified way. George, I have 233 Republicans in the House. And you’ve never seen a more dedicated group of people who are thoroughly concerned about the future of our country. They believe that Obamacare, all these regulations coming out of the administration, are threatening the future for our kids and our grandkids. It is time for us to stand and fight.

A determined minority can do a lot in our system. It has already won the battle for the hearts and minds of the Republican House caucus. That is not a modest victory.