The Wall Street Journal had a fun opinion article on Page 2 this morning. Jerry Seib took a look at a recent WSJ/NBC poll showing that Republican self-identification was down to 31 percent, versus 37% eight years ago, and that a larger share of Americans self-identify as Democrats (42%), and did his best to make lemonade out of those very sour lemons.
Seib hopefully interprets the numbers as indicating that "the GOP might be able to start climbing out of its hole, which is precisely what some party leaders are trying to do by launching a new effort to reach out to the grass roots across the country."
Here's the chart derived from the poll:
Follow on for another way to intepret the chart.
In Jerry Seib’s world, the fact that the ever-shrinking number of Republicans is even less than the number of self-identified conservatives (35%) indicates that see, people really are conservative. So naturally those conservatives should all really be part of the Republican Party, which is of course the eternal God-given home of the conservative, and then the problem is fixed, see? The problem is just that the Republican Party does a poor job of connecting. People just haven’t heard their message enough!
"People want some hope, and they want to understand where the country is going," says Rep. Eric Cantor, the second-ranking Republican in the House. He has just launched a new effort, called the National Council for a New America, which is going to send party leaders fanning out across the country to talk and listen. "Our party," he says, "has to do a much better job of connecting."
The thought never seems to enter their heads that the problem with the Republican Party isn’t that they don’t communicate their message often or loudly enough (for crying out loud, that’s all you hear 24/7 on Faux News). It never seems to occur to them that the problem with the Republican Party is that they are currently so far from the actual political center in America that even a fair proportion of self-identified conservatives want nothing to do with it.
Demonstrating that if you set Jack Bauer on your logic for long enough, you can prove anything, Seib adds the 35% of Americans who identify themselves as moderates to the 35% who self-identify as conservatives and comes to the conclusion that "America is still a center-right nation."
There's a much simpler way to read this poll and this chart: the Democratic Party is the party of centrists in this country. A plurality of self-identified moderates are also self-identified Democrats. The Republican Party can’t even keep the conservatives, let alone get the moderates, because it is repulsive not only to people on the left, but people in the center. People really do know what the Republican Party is about, and we don't like it. The mainstream of the country is going one way, and the Republican Party is going the other.
As Seib himself points out, four in ten of the self-identified conservatives identified themselves as something other than a Republican. Could it be that these 40% of self-identified conservatives aren’t just mistaken and poorly informed? Could it be that they don’t identify as Republicans because the Republican Party isn’t conservative?
Maybe America is a center-right nation... but if so, the Republican Party is an extreme-right party.