At 09:05 PM 10/28/2009, Doug Henwood wrote:
>[from a report by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, as in Stanley Greenberg:
>"the press and elites continue to look for a racial element that
>drives these voters' beliefs but they need to get over it"]
>
>The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of
>the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America,
>according to focus groups conducted by De- mocracy Corps. These base
>Republican voters dislike Barack Obama to be sure which is not very
>surprising as base Democrats had few positive things to say about
>George Bush but these voters identify themselves as part of a
>'mocked' minority with a set of shared beliefs and knowledge, and
>commitment to oppose Obama that sets them apart from the majority in
>the country. They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a 'secret
>agenda' to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand
>government control to an extent nothing short of socialism. While
>these voters are disdainful of a Republican Party they view to have
>failed in its mission, they over- whelmingly view a successful Obama
>presidency as the destruction of this country's founding principles
>and are committed to seeing the president fail.
>
>Instead of focusing on these intense ideological divisions, the press
>and elites continue to look for a racial element that drives these
>voters' beliefs but they need to get over it. Conducted on the heels
>of Joe Wilson's incendiary comments at the president's joint session
>address, we gave these groups of older, white Republican base voters
>in Georgia full opportunity to bring race into their discussion but
>it did not ever become a central element, and indeed, was almost
>beside the point.
>
>The Republican base voters are not part of the continuum leading to
>the center of the electorate: they truly stand apart. For additional
>perspective, Democracy Corps conducted a par- allel set of groups in
>suburban Cleveland. These groups, comprised of older, white, non- college
>independents and weak partisans, represent some of the most
>conservative swing voters in the electorate, and they demonstrated a
>wholly different worldview from Republican base voters by dismissing
>the fear of "socialism" and evaluating Obama in very different terms.
>Most impor- tantly, regardless of their personal feelings toward Obama
>or how they voted in 2008, they very much want to see him succeed
>because they believe the country desperately needs the change he
>promised in his campaign. Though we kept discussion points constant
>between the two sets of groups, on virtually every point of discussion
>around President Obama and the major issues fac- ing our country,
>these two audiences simply saw the world in fundamentally different
>ways underscoring the extreme disconnect of the conservative
>Republican base voters....
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