Exactly right, and the Democrats will attack and alienate their core constituencies if it will drive voters away from the GOP, because they know their misfits mandarins have nowhere else to go.
"Democrats will attack and alienate their core constituencies"
Anecdotal evidence of this: I meet with friends once a week at a bar on a neighborhood "strip" beside one of the larger, public universities in NC ... the crowd is exceedingly entertaining for a political junkie such as myself. It's a "belly of the beast" sort of place for a conservative; unreconstructed hippies who have lived there since their heyday, professors, grad students, a few of the "workers" there openly admit communist sympathies, you get the picture. The Foley topic makes them very uncomfortable. When one tries the standard Dim line about sexual predators, you can just see the eyes flying open, and the faces reddening across the bar.