This analysis is all wrong. The author seems tone deaf. He doesn’t understand the internal dynamics of the conservative movement or the party in the least.
This is an example of social science type analysis gone horribly wrong by applying some formal methodology that does not at all capture what is going on. Never the less, it is extremely unsophisticated, positing essentially a single axis to score voters, rather than breaking down voters by where they stand on different issues and then seeing what clusters together, which would be the normal way to do serious, sociology type analysis of something like this.
The claim that there is some “moderate/liberal” group of Republicans that supported both McCain in 2008 and Paul in 2012 is truly insane, as is the claim that Huntsman drew his nearly non existant support from the same faction or tendency as Paul. The rest of it is similarly weak, if not as obviously absurd. He ignores that there is a lot of deception in politics where the candidates mislead people as to where they stand and that people often choose candidates based on criteria like personality and social pressures to conform. He doesn’t grasp the ways that the various tendencies in conservatism relate to each other and why they support certain candidates. He puts too much stock in posturing by candidates.
I’m surprised a piece this awful got past the editors. I have hard time believing that someone read this and said “okay, publish it as is.” I would have demanded a total rewrite from scratch with a new thesis. It’s not salvageable.
Instead of using the terms everyone else does, like libertarians, neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, fiscal conservatives or the religious right, he invents new, incoherent categories that seem to bear little resemblance to any real people. No mention of the different tendencies of different age groups is another glaring flaw, but I guess that doesn’t matter if you think there has been no changes in the tendencies since 1996.
The idea that the party’s voters are basically the same as in 1996(hint: a quarter of the GOP voters in 1996 are dead now and another quarter were not voting then), the claim that the most conservative voters are secular, inside the beltway types interested mostly in economic issues...huh? Does he really think that the most hardcore conservatives in the party are the people who work as political apparatchiks in DC? Does this guy know any conservatives? No mention of the sense of betrayal that so many conservatives feel towards folks like Bush and McCain and how many people have changed various views over the years. No mention of the Perot campaign or the internal division of the early 90’s between the Buchanan faction and the NWO supporters that foreshadowed the tea party/establishment divide of today.
Just terrible.
It also has a pro-liberal, anti-conservative slant, suggesting that moderates of some kind are the main tendency and that real conservatives are tiny group, but have too much power and influence in DC.
I do not have the background you have but I noticed a couple of things. First, he only goes back to 1996. Why not to 1976? He seems to go out of his way to discount Ronald Reagan.
The second thing I noticed - and the writer may have mentioned this later on and I just did not read it - is that some of these states where the winner wins are open primary. We can only wonder what the results would have been if all primary states were Republican only.
Speaking of Reagan, I again heard the spin this weekend that even Reagan could not win the Republican electorate in this type of atmosphere. To that I say BS! I think that the majority of these people who say that still do not understand what Reagan was about. He always spoke in positive terms of how great this country is and can still be into the future. And people believed him because he always came across that way. His actions were the same as his words and people responded to that. I think that is the reason so many are split concerning todays crop of Republicans. Most of them, their actions do not match their words.
Anyway - once again - great rebuttal and post on your part.