The Daily KOS Republicans Poll: How Insane/Evil Are They?

EDIT: DISREGARD THE CONTENT OF THIS POST. Since it was written, Daily KOS has not only fired Research 2000 and repudiated all the results of their polls, but have gone so far as to sue Research 2000 for fraud in their polling.

In short, the numbers below, according to Daily KOS, were made up entirely out of whole cloth.

And since my conclusions in this post were based entirely on these numbers, I doubt there's much of any value remaining in this post. So... ignore this one, and look at some of the others instead. - Kris

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I've said it repeatedly: the Republicans are the Party of Evil, the Democrats are the Party of Caving In to Evil.

Markos Moulitas, founder of the Daily KOS, commissioned the polling firm Research 2000 to poll 2,000 self-described Republicans. His goal: to demonstrate that not just the Republican elected officials, but the Republican Party base as a whole, was too stupid, too evil, too batshit insane, and too uniformly in opposition to the Democratic Party for bipartisanship to have any chance at all of success.

The results can be summed up in two words: overwhelming success.

The three frontrunners for the 2012 GOP nomination for President are Sarah Palin (16%), Mitt Romney (11%)... and Dick Cheney (10%). 42% are undecided.

39% of Republicans believe Obama should be impeached.

36% of Republicans are "birthers."

53% of Republicans believe Sarah Palin- whose lies are legion and whose self-serving nature abundantly clear- is better qualified to be President than Obama.

31% of Republicans believe Obama is a white-hating racist.

23% of Republicans want to secede from the Union.

There's more, but these numbers, as I've just presented them, are a bit misleading. There's a couple of vital points to the survey that deserve attention. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com points out one: that on most of the questions in the survey, there is very little variation in demographic tabs- men and women, different regions, different races, etc. The Republican Party is at its most uniform in makeup in history.

Of course, Nate's article misses the obvious reason, as shown in the demographic breakdown of the survey- the GOP is becoming a regional party. Research 2000 did random national calling, hitting pretty much every state... and, to get their 2,000 self-described Republicans, they ended up getting 846, or 42% of the total, from the South- the old Confederacy minus Oklahoma, minus West Virginia, minus Missouri, plus Kentucky. Twelve states, representing maybe one-quarter of the nation's population, make up over two-fifths of Republican supporters. Southerners dominate the Republican Party- and thus southern beliefs dominate Republican Party beliefs.

But there's something else to consider here, which Nate Silver missed. Markos Moulitas wrote the questions for this survey. With only a few exceptions, by the liberal viewpoint the questions have a right answer and a very, very WRONG answer. On such questions, the southern-region demographic tab is invariably strongest in giving the wrong answer. For example, on the question of secession, fully one-third of Southern respondents supported secession- with only 52% opposed. No other region broke 20% in favor, and all other regions were over 60% opposed.

More to the point, with most of the questions there is a large "don't know" response- usually in the double digits, often a majority of all respondents. That means a lot of Republicans might not openly give the outright wrong answer, but they're open to it- they fail to give the RIGHT answer.

So, instead of showing just how crackpot the Republicans are by showing the percentage giving the wrong answer, let's go down the list of questions in the poll for which one of the two options is quite definitely wrong (by liberal standards, if not by all non-Republican standards), and show just how little hope there is for redeeming the Grand Old Party.

Only 32% of Republicans believe Barack Obama should not be impeached.

Only 42% of Republicans definitely believe Barack Obama was born a United States citizen.

Only 43% of Republicans believe Obama does NOT want the terrorists to win.

Only 24% of Republicans believe ACORN did NOT steal the 2008 election.

Only 36% of Republicans believe Obama is not a racist.

58% of Republicans oppose secession.

Only 26% of Republicans support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

Only 26% of Republicans support allowing homosexuals to serve in the US military.

Only 7% of Republicans support same-sex marriage; only 11% support allowing gay couples the same legal benefits as married couples, with or without marriage.

Only 8% of Republicans support allowing homosexuals to teach in public schools.

Only 42% of Republicans want sex education in any form- even abstinence-only- allowed in public schools.

Only 15% of Republicans believe that the Book of Genesis should not be taught in public schools as the explanation of how the world came to be.

Now for a run of good news:

76% of Republicans believe marriage is an equal partnership.

56% of Republicans believe contraceptives should be legal.

48% of Republicans believe birth control medication is not abortion.

86% of Republicans believe women should work outside the home.

So... a little bit of hope for gender equality, but otherwise pretty dismal- and I'm deliberately leaving out questions where the right and wrong answer is clearly debatable outside of Republican circles.

For my final point, let's go back to the demographics. It's no surprise that the elderly dominate responses- first, we already knew that older people vote Republican; second, this is a land-line phone poll, which skews to the elderly in any case.

But there are other things to note here. First and foremost is race. Nationwide, white/Caucasian/European makes up slightly less than half of the total- call it 45% of Americans are white.

89% of Republicans in this survey are white. Only 11% of Republicans said they weren't- and this category includes, "refused to state," which means that the total percentage of white Republicans is almost certainly higher than 89% in reality.

And if you look at the non-white response to the questions, you see some major differences with the rest. 80% of non-white Republicans are undecided as to a Presidential preference (Palin being their frontrunner at 8%). They're 41-31 against impeachment. 51% oppose the birthers. Two-thirds oppose secession. By 45-42 they favor a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. 31% oppose creationism in public schools. Only on issues touching on homosexuality does the non-white Republican response fall in line with the overwhelming white majority.

So there you have it: the Republicans are dominated by white Southern bigots and theocrats, profound in their ignorance, who basically regard anyone not like themselves as an enemy to be destroyed for that reason alone.

Nothing I haven't known for quite some time, of course, but Barack Obama doesn't seem to have learned it yet...