Study: Republican voters abandoning conservatism for Fuehrer-mentality.
TL ; DR
A psychological study found:
- self-identified hard-core Republicans/Conservatives are actually sheeple looking for a strong-man to lead them
- self-identified moderate Republicans/Conservatives actually care about conservatism
- voters self-identify more by group than by ideology
Obama has killed the GOP. He tricked them into showing their true self. The GOP sought to inflame the anger of their constituency, but with that they only drove their voters ideologically further away from conservatism and towards an ideology-free Fuehrer-mentality.
Ryan and McConnell should really, really, really, really be worried that the republican voters are becoming estranged from conservatism. For example: If a voter voted for Trump, why would he vote for some lame-ass Republican like McCain or Romney in future elections?????
Aaaaaaaaaand I'll say it again, because it's such a nice word: Sheeple.
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/does-the-gop-base-love-trump-more-than-it-hates-amnesty.html
In March 2016, Marco Rubio stood before the conservative movement’s largest annual gathering — and implored his audience to remember what it believed.
“Being a conservative can never be about simply an attitude,” the Florida senator explained. “Being a conservative cannot simply be about how long you’re willing to scream, how angry you’re willing to be, or how many names you’re willing to call people.” Instead, Rubio insisted, that being a conservative was about remaining faithful to “a set of ideas and principles” — including free enterprise, traditional values, and the inviolability of Constitutional rights.
Within weeks, Rubio’s audience would prove him wrong.
...
The nationalist right’s message, in sum: Trumpism can never simply be about an attitude — it’s built on a set of ideas and principles.
There’s reason to believe that Breitbart’s right about this — but there’s also cause for thinking that they may end up suffering the same disillusionment that the National Review did in 2016.
In the New York Times, Thomas Edsall assembles evidence for the latter scenario. Edsall highlights a recent study from two political scientists at Brigham Young University, which found that many Republican voters are “malleable to the point of innocence,
...
The authors conducted a survey with YouGov of 1,300 voters broken into five subgroups, each of which was asked 10 questions using a research design that employed “both ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ Trump cues.”
1. “Do you support or oppose increasing the minimum wage to over $10 an hour?”
2. “Donald Trump has said that he supports this policy. How about you? Do you support or oppose increasing the minimum wage to over $10 an hour?”
3. “Donald Trump has said that he opposes this policy. How about you? Do you support or oppose increasing the minimum wage to over $10 an hour?”
The result: The more strongly a voter identified with the Republican Party, the more likely she was to follow Trump leftward.
...
Strong conservatives were more likely to embrace a Trump-backed “left-wing” position than those voters who identified as more ideologically moderate.
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In 2011, 61 percent of white Evangelical Christians disagreed with the statement, “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life,”
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Five years and one “grab ’em by the pussy” tape later, 72 percent of white Evangelicals told PRRI that an elected official could behave ethically in public life even if he had committed immoral acts in his private one.
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In recent Republican Senate primaries, the more moderate a GOP incumbent’s positions on immigration, the more likely they were to be ousted by a challenger.
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The GOP’s political leadership, elite commentators, and donor class cried out, in unison, that Trump was an interloper — a Clinton donor, a Democrat, a New York liberal. But these appeals to the GOP base’s partisan identity proved far less potent than Trump’s appeals to white racial panic.
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