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Edited on Tue Nov-29-05 10:40 PM by Mayberry Machiavelli
coalition of factions. In recent years they seem to have done a much better job of keeping all the factions under the same tent and happily voting for their tin gods.
Examples of GOP factions:
-Christian fundamentalist voters ("intelligent design" and anti gay marriage type voters) -People making over 200K (tax issues)
Now I personally know a lot of people in the high income faction. I know some who are in both factions because where I live there is a high prevalence of people of all economic strata being fundie type Christians.
But I know a lot of people who like to vote Republican mainly because they are relatively wealthy and they see the Republicans as the champion of tax policies that favor their bottom line more than the Dems would. Some of these people have liberal social mores, and live decidedly NON Christian, non-fundie type lifestyles (let's just leave it at that for now). These people tend to be comfortable voting for Bush for selfish reasons but many are at least somewhat uneasy with all the promotion of fundamentalist issues, degrading of science education, and denouncing of alternative lifestyles etc. that seems part of the "morals voter" package of the Republican platform. As long as they see the Repubs are unable, or unwilling, to run roughshod over the country to push these agendas into law, they can still remain somewhat comfortable with their vote. However, if suddenly there was a huge national push to legislate, say, "intelligent design" being taught and no evolution mentioned, in all public schools, many of these intelligent, educated, selfish tax bracket voters would either stay home or vote Dem.
A large plurality of Americans favors abortion being kept legal. This means that many people who are fine with the status quo on abortion vote Republican even though the GOP is the "antiabortion" party. No doubt many of these voters are mainly happy to keep voting Repub on whatever their issues, tax policy, foreign policy, as long as they feel the GOP overall is using the fundies for their votes and puts them back in the basement after the elections.
If the "morals"/fundie part of the Repub "big tent" is allowed to completely take over and cause the outlawing of abortion in America, this could cause a major fracture in the GOP voting bloc that could be disastrous. This doesn't mean that all pro choice voters will suddenly vote in a 60 plus percent block against the GOP, but it doesn't take all that many votes to ruin you in national elections when you are only winning by a percent or less, if that.
Get the picture?
The problem isn't so much fundies not turning out for the GOP anymore, the GOP has sold fundie Christians on their "brand" and that isn't likely to change in the next few years. Although it IS possible that they could lose some turnout from the fundies due to losing one of the issues that fires them up and gets them to the polls.
It's losing votes from the other, NON fundie GOP factions getting nervous and scared as they see the fundie beast out of the basement and broken loose from its chains for the first time.
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