Republican pollster Frank Luntz has come up with a list of five myths about Republicans. He’s really talking about voters, not elected officials. Let’s take a look at the list:
1. Conservatives care most about the size of government.
2. Conservatives want to deport all illegal immigrants.
3. They worship Wall Street.
4. Conservatives want to slash Social Security and Medicare.
5. Conservatives don’t care about [economic] inequality.
Luntz specializes in finding the right way of asking a question in order to get a positive response. He tests out different phrases to see which ones people respond to the best. So, what he’s demonstrating is less what the base of the GOP thinks than the most effective way of getting them to respond the way Luntz wants them to respond. But I still don’t think Luntz is wrong in the bigger picture. He has identified five things that are generally, in a statistical sense, not true about Republican voters.
What he has thereby done is paint an exact portrait of how a Democrat should run in conservative areas of the country. Populism, populism, populism.
Conservatives don’t have an obsession with the size of government. They don’t like the big cats in the financial sector who finance the party. They don’t want people messing with Social Security and Medicare. And they do care, a lot, about economic inequality. The problem is that the Republican Party is completely the opposite. President Bush tried to privatize Social Security and his tax cuts were like nitroglycerin for economic inequality. Paul Ryan’s budget plan would turn Medicare into a voucher program. Conservatives want to know why so few bankers have been held accountable for the housing collapse and financial crisis. Republicans talk about repealing the Wall Street reforms enacted by the Democrats and signed by the president. And, on immigration, while conservatives are realistic about deportation, Mitt Romney wants to make life so miserable for Latinos that they will leave the country voluntarily.
The GOP’s platform isn’t really all that popular among mainstream conservatives. But the mainstream doesn’t drive the party. The mouth-breathers drive the party. And that’s why there is a giant opening for the Democrats to come right in and steal their lunch.
