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[Douglas Carpenter]

87. I was thinking primarily in terms of how many, maybe even most Republicans really have no idea what

The Republican Party supports and even less idea about what the Democratic Party supports.

In 1984 when Reagan carried 49 out of 50 states, many political scientist were perplexed by the reality that when polled on specific positions – by equally landslide proportions – most American clearly were far closer to agreeing with Walter Mondale than with Ronald Reagan on the issues.

But even then - although Walter Mondale originally had a background as a Hubert Humphrey protégé - by the time of the 1984 elections his actually specific positions on specific issues had shiftd so much to the right that one was certainly not voting for the kind of New Dealer/Great Society policies that many people thought a Mondale vote represented. Even then, not only did Republicans assume that the Democratic Party was far more left than it actually was - most Democratic Party supporters assumed that the Democratic Party was considerably more left than it actually was. This has been the case for a long time now.