Talk Elections

How the HELL did Bush and Dole get double digits ANYWHERE in 92 and 96? After Clinton bent over backwards campaigning as a centrist it was all for nothing? There is no reason, in a three way contest for a republican to be pulling 20% of democrats ANYWHERE!!! My god, in some of these states Clinton only got HALF of democrats in 92!

Party ID doesn't mean much in terms of ideology, or voting behavior really, in the Upper South and Appalachia. Yeah, I don't get why they don't switch parties either. If you never vote for your party's candidate at the federal level, you should declare as an independent.

The nature of the Democratic Party is part of it also. Unlike the Republicans, who are organized around a semi-coherent ideology, the Democrats are a coalition of diverse groups who have different, and sometimes contradictory, interests and goals.

true...

A good chunk of this country's voters will always vote for the pro-life candidate.  Another chunk will always vote for the one that promises a tax cut.  Another chunk will always vote for the pro-gun candidate.  That will usually add up to around 40-45%.  That's why Republicans hit double-digits.

If the democrats entirely dropped the gun control blank the GOP's 40-45% of the electorate goes down by 5-10%

Is the pro-life issue really what has destroyed democrats in appalachia? Why not change your voter registration if your going to be an idiot fundamentalist? I think many of these dumb hicks still just associate republicans with the rich and democrats with the poor, and therefore refuse to change their party id, even though they never vote that way.

I don't think it's the Upper South/Appalachia (cuz Clinton won there) so much as the Deep South, where Democrats almost never win on any Federal level.

Also, most people aren't so politically active that they change their registrations.  If you could change registration on election day when you cast your ballot, I suspect it'd be much more common.

The upper south is the area I'm talking about, Clinton won very narrowly there and this is the area where democrats have been defecting the most to the republicans. 

The religious zealots are very disturbing to me. If I hadn't been forced to spend 11 years in a fundamentalist school I never would have believed that there were that many people that actually voted solely on the anti-abortion issue. The bush worshipping was at a max there too.

There are a lot more pro-life Demmycrats out at the local/state level in the South/Midwest... and the pro-choice guys bend over backwards to have it not come up.

What I just can't understand is how so many people can vote SOLEY on this issue. It just doesn't make any sense to me at all.

I think a good chunk of the board, and probably a good chunk of the American electorate, agree with you.

Well, I can believe it.  I have two good friends who are extremely intelligent, very worldly, and knowledgeable about the issues.  They are also extremely devout and refuse to vote for a pro-choice candidate.  Between half a million and a million abortions occur every year in the United States.  If you believe each of those represents a homicide, I can see why the issue would be compelling.

EDIT: This Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States#Public_Opinion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States#Public_Opinion) gives a poll on public opinion conducted in 2003.  Here's the crosstab:

Group	Generally available	Available, but with stricter limits than now	Not permitted
Overall	39%	38%	22%
Women	37%	37%	24%
Men	40%	40%	20%
Democrats	43%	35%	21%
Republicans	29%	41%	28%
Independents	42%	38%	18%
Northeasterners	48%	31%	19%
Midwesterners	34%	40%	25%
Southerners	33%	41%	25%
Westerners	43%	40%	16%

Are you saying that you believe there is actually a large non-fundamentalist pro-life crowd? Sure, there may be some, but I doubt many vote on that issue.

There were a good amount of Clinton Republicans or people who indirectly shifted to the D's because of him, finally becoming the current coalition that put Obama in power.