What's amazing is how often people who are on welfare call up these talk radio shows. ofc the host always assures them that THEY aren't the leeches and moochers, it's those other people who aren't even looking for work, the people who DON'T WANT to work that are the real problem.

I think it is basically like this: right wingers are on disability, which is fine because you know, they want to work but cant, but the poors, especially poor black people, are on welfare and food stamps because, you know, they just refuse to get a damn job.

Can you read? Look at the whole exchange.

No, he's not. Read the whole exchange instead of cherry picking from one post. Here is what the first poster said:

Here is what Low Key said in response:

LastLife asked a question that has a clear, factual, undisputed answer. Low Key decided to respond with the opposite of that.

Bravo, Low Key. Clearly, your intellectual dishonesty was executed to perfection. You got Phill and Wookie to ignore context and provide support to the garbage answer that you gave LastLife. Well played, indeed.

Bravo at not reading the post LL was responding to:

If you want to be mad at anyone for changing the terms of the discussion, you can be mad at LL.

I respect your position OP, but I am also completely in disagreement.

I am open to being wrong about this, but here is why I think the Republican Party doesn't go away:

Neither party goes away because it's perfect for the Ultra Powerful/Wealthy. I'm not saying that because they love the Reps, I'm saying it for a different reason:

These people essentially are only afraid of one thing (aside from US Citizens being greatly harmed which means it harms their cash cow), and that is mass agreement on a primary issue amongst citizens. They cannot have that. That takes their power away. I'm sure you see how.

And, through the media, and the illusion of choice we think we have, this country is so divided that even KNOWING what I say to be true means nothing because people just wont come to a consensus on anything.

I mean, I know you have seen plenty of staunch (idiot) Republican voters...they're everywhere. You can't talk to them. They hate gay people, people on welfare, and people in Middle Eastern countries, and in some ways they fear those entities (which is powerful). ALL of these manufactured issues attracted X amount of people, and repelled Y amount of people, which is exactly the goal.

I was semi-trolling. Only semi because the party that ended slavery ended up being the party that opposed the civil rights movement. If that transition can happen, then pretty much anything could, time it takes notwithstanding.

To my original claim, I'm not saying immigration is the only problem that non-white/black has with the GOP or that Hispanics are <insert w/e>. I simply believe that an immigration flip flop would be +ev both short and long term for the GOP. Before bashing that, please consider everything that would have to occur for the GOP to flip flop on immigration, then feel free to bash.

Right. 1 election out of power isn't bad, 2 is a cause for worry, and 3 is pure panic mode. They will change their ideology.

Yeah, but at least you can admit it.

I agree with this.

When?

The GOP is beholden to the Christian right. They went down that path 25 years ago and can't get away from it. Let them have their civil war. Either real conservatives will win out, or the religious weirdos will win out.

I'm betting on the religious weirdos. There are simply are too many of them.

What would the Republican Party even change its ideology to?

I mean, are they gonna cut out the entire tea party wing, effectively the big government in the bedroom small government in the office social conservatives, which is basically their entire grass roots support and through the Kochs a huge chunk of their funding? Do you think these guys will accept "hey, we disagree with you having an abortion/being black/being poor/disliking that rape that just happened, but we are easy breezy Republicans now and wont do anything to stop you doing what we agree with"? Is "we must fight fight fight for our moral issues then when we win power do everything but address these disagreements because it is not our place to force them into agreeing, merely to fire scorn and derision in their direction" a winning message?

If they do change their ideology, what even sets them apart from the Democratic Party? The Democratic Party is full of anti abortion former KKK (literally) people but they are allowed in because they are in the "we disagree but wont legislate our disagreement" mode. As an example of not knowing what sets them apart, when Rubio talks about crafting some kind of amnesty bill and when Perry talks about instituting a state based DREAM act, ignore for a second these were pretty unpopular, what were they doing to set themselves apart from the Dems? Is Perry and Romney's "we will do that exact Federal thing (DREAM and Obamacare) but at the state level, cos you know, states rights" a winner? Note that the multiple rape guys (lol multiple) from the 2012 race were for pretty minor positions of power and yet their words had a lot of impact on the main race and were undoubtedly part of why Obama crushed Romney among younger women, so the idea that Rubio is fighting for a Florida and Texas amnesty program and meanwhile Arizona and New Mexico is in the opposite direction - that **** is states rights alright, but it wont sell on the main stage and the actions of some states undermine the image of the party as a whole - just see how SB1070 and the vaginal probe bills did for the Republican Party overall despite being concentrated in the state level.

So, yeah, what is going on here. How do Republicans win a game they seem to have self rigged where the Democrat proposals are considerably popular from healthcare and banking reform right through to gun control. Do they go even more to the left? Do they meet somewhere in the middle hoping to pick up some votes to counter the votes they will lose from the far right and if they do how likely does it seem they will get enough to win the White House in this generation? Obama pretty comfortably won re-election with a pretty terrible economy and 4 years of demonising, the next person up will either be very very popular (Hillary) or have massive amounts of charisma that they can beat Hillary (Obama version 2.0). Is the Republican Party literally reliant on Democrats ****ing up so badly that they literally cant help but win back the WH?

There's gold in this thread .

It wouldn't be that hard for the Republican party to change. Not only that, they don't have so far to go: they are already doing fine at the state level (dominant party in half the states), they control the House, etc.

The problem isn't that Republicans are so far out of the mainstream, it is simply the feeling that, at a national level, they are moving in the wrong direction, mostly due to their primary process in the past few cycles.

I think they need to get a candidate who isn't from the stone age. Obama is sort of a guy young people can look up to, he's "cool, smart, knows how to use the internet.

I mean Mitt or Mccain were awful choices in regards to young voters. What young person wants to vote for an old guy who hates vaginas?

They need to get a better candidate who lives in reality and they will win. Social Media has changed the election and they need to adapt to that. This isn't the George Bush era of voting anymore.

W jr got 46% of the 18-29 vote. Mittens Q. got 37%. Old man McCain got 32%.

The voting bloc isn't as big or as important as you might think. That segment is only around 18-19% of the electorate.

Meanwhile, the 30-44 voting bloc has been on the winning side of presidential elections as far back as 72, possibly further. And they're around 30% of the electorate.

In terms of raw votes they lost the House. They only kept a majority due to the district border gerrymandering. At any point that is reversed they are really screwed in the House assuming the 2012 is representative of an average future election.

They have also lost the popular vote on 5 of the last 6 elections for President and if you look at policy polling the two parties are more or less stood still but the country is moving to the left overall on a whole range of policies.

They can catch up infrastructurally - the 2012 cycle was a complete disaster in terms of GOTV activity for the right while the left just uber killed it. Throw enough money at that problem and it goes away. But they have real pressing demographic concerns that will only magnify as the baby boomer generation they are beholden to is dying off rapidly due to old age right now.

They also have another problem that has surfaced in the 2012 cycle where the primary process has become a freak show where the reason they are strong at the state level by moving right with a bag of tricks to energise and activate the base has created a real roadblock that created the situation where the last four standing was Paul, Gingrich, Santorum and Romney where the sanest most electable one who won had to go through an expensive and grueling primary fight that nearly bankrupted his campaign and then it set him up on various positions that he had to just absorb and which damaged him even after his dive to the center because he couldnt avoid the power of youtube and social media sharing.

They are strong at the state level because of gerrymandering. The party with the spread out constituents has a natural edge in gerrymandering ability.

I think that edge has actually been a net negative to the party, it fools them into thinking their ideas are more popular and turns their minor league candidate development system into just as much of a freakshow as the main nomination process.

Like, sure, they've got 30 Governors. But that's because they swept the in the Tea Party wave to add to their existing stranglehold on the small states of the south and great plains.

If states awarded ECs based on governorship, the GOP would get 318 votes. Flip Florida and Pennsylvania to D and the GOP would have a 28-22 governor edge but a 269-269 tie in EC states. Basically the same thing as the Senate is going on here. The GOP gets both Dakotas and Wyoming, the Democrats get New York. 3-1 governors, GOP ideas obviously more popular.

My impression is that the national brand is in more trouble than the local one.

You get to gerrymander by controlling the state government, so it's not like this can be washed away, and I agree that gerrymandering has hurt the GOP in the medium term.

That the GOP controls a greater percentage of governorships than senate seats does not strike me as a coincidence.

They control a majority of statehouses but those states don't contain a majority of the population. This is just another stupid metric the wingnuts trot out to rationalize away their self-inflicted collapse.

I mean yeah, great, you control Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Idaho. There are probably more people living is Los Angeles county than in all of those states combined.

Huntsman didn't seem that bad.

b

this is echoed on FB pages.

People rant about people on gov't assistance, until a bud says, 'hey, wait a minute...'

then it's followed by an, 'oh, not you. I understand your circumstances....it's those OTHER people....'


Extra bonus points for those who post how bad gov't assistance is when they themselves were on it within 2-3 years prior.

Unless you're anything non-right because then you're just gaming the system and should be investigated for fraud.

It is delivering rather well.

b

One of my conservative friends sent me the map of presidential winner by county, which is like an absolute sea of red. Yeah, sure, Obama might have won Cuyahoga county by a quarter of a million votes, but look at Wyoming! Mitt Romney, President of Square Miles.

Oh dearly self-deported friend Inso had one of the best bits about this. Not only had he himself been on welfare and escaped the cycle of dependency, all the poor Southern white voters who vote reliably Republican aren't the leeches:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=739

This seems like a relevant place to talk about how the Dems are launching a multi-year, multi-million, dollar campaign to take Texas:

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/0...lue-86651.html

Cliffs:
Run by OFA's national field director
Using same tactics as OFA (huge networks of volunteers and mass voter registration efforts)

Right, but, surprise: there's a bias against urban areas in how the power is divided up.

Honestly, I'm just not seeing the "collapse". The problem with the Republican party isn't where it is, so much as it's moving in the wrong direction.