Republicans Have Given up

The Republican attacks on McCain confused me. They claim he's not a conservative and Coulter says he's more liberal than Hillary. That''s just demonstrably false. Based on his record he's a solid conservative. All of Coulter's "McCain is just like Clinton" rhetoric is clearly not true. Look no further than Supreme Court nominations to prove that. Though if they really do control the court and change policy on abortion and gay marriage, etc. then the conservatives lose their wedge issues.

McCain has strong conservative stances on Abortion, Gun Control, the war, reducing government spending, civil rights, affirmative action, the death penalty, flag burning (remember that one?), health care reform, labor/unions, prayer in schools, and the PATRIOT Act.

He's being attacked for positions on taxes, immigration, torture, and embryonic stem cell research. He opposed the Bush tax cuts before because there were no spending cuts (a conservative position) but now wants to keep the cuts to help the economy. On immigration he's from a border state and perhaps realizes the impossibility of deporting 12 million people. That doesn't make him liberal, it makes him rational. On torture his position can only be called sane as he's the only person in this public debate who's been tortured. On stem cell research he might be liberal, but the issue is so closely related to abortion where he is 100% conservative. He's moderate on the environment and against oil drilling in ANWR, but he's otherwise conservative on energy.

I think the issue is that Republican party leaders can't control him. If the North Vietnamese couldn't, what chance do they have? It's the same problem with Huckabee, he's too religious and the Republican support of the evangelicals is a sham just to get their votes. They don't want to give them actual power. Romney's fakeness showed through and Thompson wasn't interested enough to campaign. Other possible candidates probably didn't want to inherit the messes Bush will leave.

I think what's really going on is that they've looked not at the results of the Republican primary but at the turnouts in both parties' primaries and have realized the Democrats are going to win regardless of who runs. I haven't seen this reported in this way, and I don't know why, but here are the total votes by party in all the primaries so far. I didn't count caucuses because the numbers reported aren't comparable.

All the data is from CNN and yes I was looking for an excuse to play with Apple's spreadsheet. The state names are colored based on how they voted in the 2004 presidential election. So Arkansas is a red state, but of all the primary voters this year, 58% voted Democratic. That's not a percentage of registered voters, that's how many people actually voted this season. GA, MO, OK, SC, and TN are now, arguably, blue states. I included the FL and MI numbers but the Democratic primaries didn't count in those states. Overall, 61% of the primary voters so far have voted Democratic. If I don't count the skewed FL and MI numbers, that goes up to 64%.

I haven't done the work to plot out how the electoral votes for all the states would actually go, but I think Republicans are cutting and running. They are positioning things now so that the Republican loss is mitigated. The next president is going to have such a hard time fixing the damage Bush did to the middle east, our military, our economy and our reputation, that they want the bad stuff to happen under a Democratic administration. They're hoping Obama is another Jimmy Carter, so that they can find another Reagan for 2012. Then they can say conservatives didn't even have someone to vote for in 2008, it's not like they actually lost.