Poll: 51% Of Republicans Would Rather Have A Minority In Congress Than RINOS
And you can count me as being firmly in that 51%.
The poll indicates that a slight majority, 51 percent, of Republicans would prefer to see the GOP in their area nominate candidates who agree with them on all the major the issues even if they have a poor chance of beating the Democratic candidate. Forty-three percent of Republicans say they would rather have candidates with whom they don’t agree on all the important issues but who can beat the Democrats.
Democrats polled seemed to place a slightly higher priority on electoral victory: 58 percent say that they would like their party to nominate candidates who can beat Republicans, even if they don’t agree with those candidates on all the issues. Fewer than 4 in 10 Democrats say they would rather see their party nominate candidates who agree with them on all major issues, but have a poor chance of beating the Republican candidate.
“One reason for the difference between the parties: the Democrats have a relatively even split on ideological grounds. Thirty-four percent of Democrats are liberal, 40 percent are moderates and less than one in four call themselves conservatives,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
By contrast, 73 percent of Republicans questioned in the poll say they are conservatives, with only 26 percent describing themselves as liberal or moderate Republicans.
Everyone treats this like a “what comes first the chicken or the egg” debate.
We have political parties for the purpose of advancing a certain political agenda. You can’t advance that agenda if you don’t win elections. But, at least according to some, you can’t win elections if you don’t vary from that agenda to some degree.
So conventional wisdom is that ideological rigidity leads to marginalization.
Now, I understand pragmatism. I understand that any national political party is going to have a level of variance in ideology. But there are certain basic things that the party stands for, and if certain given politicians aren’t going to stand for those things than we are, frankly, better off without them.
Better to win elections on as cohesive a platform as possible than to win elections by just doing whatever we think it takes to get elected at the moment. The latter may work well in the short term, but in the long run the former builds lasting majorities.
I’d much rather educate the public as to why things like individualism and free markets work and are the best way of doing things than to cater to their whims.
