Party Planning

Chris Cilizza notes that the latest ABC/WaPo poll shows that while more than one in three Americans consider themselves Democrats (35%) and nearly two in five are Independents like myself (38%), only about one in five Americans now consider themselves Republicans (21%).

These numbers come on the heels of Steve Schmidt, former campaign manager for Arizona Sen. John McCain's presidential bid, declaring the Republican party a "shrinking entity" last week-- citing the decline of GOP numbers in the west, northeast and mountain west as evidence.

And they show a somewhat significant decline from even last November's election when exit polls showed 32 percent of voters identifying as Republican as compared to 39 percent for Democrats and 29 percent for independents and others. (A caveat: voters tend to see things through a more partisan lens after having just voted in a presidential election than they do in an April poll.)

The Post poll numbers show the challenge for Republicans in stark terms.

The number of people who see themselves as GOPers is on the decline even as those who remain within the party grow more and more conservative.

That means that the loyal base of the party has an even larger voice in terms of the direction it heads even as more and more empirical evidence piles up that the elevation of voices like former vice president Dick Cheney does little to win over wavering Republicans or recruit Independents back to the GOP cause.

The Purge Of The Moderates from the ranks of the GOP is most certainly underway. That hardcore 20% of America that remains proudly Republican are not the Arlen Specters or the Mitt Romneys or the Susan Collinses of the political world. They are the Steve Kings, James Inhofes, and Michele Bachmanns of the fringe, extremist far right, the paranoid few who scream endlessly about Obama's fake birth certificate, fascist re-education camps, the global warming hoax, gays and lesbians destroying the world, the need to provide creationism as an alternative to the "unproven theory of evolution", and how the Swine Flu epidemic is just a ruse to get Kathleen Sebelius a job at HHS.

These are the kind of people who are now left in the GOP at this point. I forsee 2010 and 2012 will purge many of the remaining moderates from Washington as the party becomes not the Mighty Elephant but the Screaming Wingnut, the kind almost begging for another terror attack to hit the US so they can feel vindicated.

The kind of people who are left in the Republican Party are the kind of people who lament Dick Cheney not having run for President in 2008 not because a man with an approval rating even worse than Dubya would have actually won, but because it the campaign season would have purged the weak, useless moderates from the GOP much sooner and the GOP of today would be in better shape to fight Obama now, having already re-emerged from the civil war to reforge itself down to the ashes of Neo-Hoover, Neo-Goldwater conservatism instead of fighting that war now.

When the smoke clears, the GOP will be the party of Malkinvania, Glennsanity, and Bachmanniac.

Get used to that one in five thing, gentlemen.