Let's break it down this way, if you take all the hateful pundits, all the totally hawkish conservative lawmakers, the people you worked with on that newspaper and anyone you've conversed with online you get what, maybe a 600 people? Let's be really generous and say your sample size is 2,000 people.

The population of the united states is 318.9 million people, of which 174.9 million people are registered voters(which I suppose is the more important number for us to consider) making that percentage who are conservative to equal to 68.2 million people. So, taking that number and comparing it to your sample size means that you are judging 68.2 million based on your experiences with about .0029 percent of them...does that sound like a ratio that is likely to give you an accurate view of the whole?

But heck, let's toss that aside, you've also made a judgement of this population based on who they've elected...but only about 15% of conservatives are said to approve of congress, so how then can we say these politicians truly represent their electorate?

The answer?

You can't, at least not honestly. Now, you can perhaps blame those who elected those officials for the decisions they've made in office, but you can't say those decisions represent the beliefs of those people.

I think in order to answer the question of the divide between that approval rating and the people who elected them ties into the question Adamwarlock posed earlier. The fact is that as humans we are complicated creatures and our feelings are likely to range along the political spectrum from issue to issue and that how we choose to identify ourselves depends on which topics you feel are most important, and as Slam pointed out even that may change over time. So although yes, 38% of the electorate identifies as conservative that doesn't mean that there is a unified front among them, but a range of opinions.

I am with Hoosier here.

Let me be more precise: There certainly are thoughtful, moderate conservatives. But if they have any kind of conscience, they are no longer associated with the Republican party. I mean, the front runner in the presidential elections is calling for a return of Operation Wetback and laughs it off when his supporters beat up immigrants in his name. In my country, Trump would be considered a Neo Nazi and would be likely to already be facing criminal charges of Volksverhetzung (incitement of racially motivated violence). And he is not an exceptions, he is the condensation of what has become of the GOP in the past 30 or so years.

It's not a party that any good person should remain a member of. It takes a whole lot of white, straight, male privilege to ignore that. And for the life of me, I cannot figure out black Republicans like Carson or the few remaining gay Republicans, like Larry Craig.

Purely a "colorful Americanism," I'll have you know ... per the executive editor of my aforementioned old newspaper in Little Rock. He also let us know that racism & neo-Nazis didn't exist & that men couldn't be raped. And that executions of prisoners were to be restricted to page 3B treatment because they're merely a standard outcome of the judicial process. 

He fancied himself a libertarian. Which he might have been; I have no idea. What he wasn't was a journalist. He was, however, a lawyer, whose main qualification for the editorship was, I gather, brokering the adoptions of the children the publisher bought for himself. *sigh*

Since prisoner executions tended to happen on my watch as night city editor, looking back I really have no idea why I didn't snap & go on a killing rampage at some point. After Arkansas carried out the nation's first triple execution in something like 50 years, I wound up giving a phone interview to some radio station in Australia. Back home, of course, it was a small 3B headline as usual.

Um, I wish you had responded to what I had said about the lack of critical thinking skills among conservatives rather than mischaracterizing what I said by acting like I called them crazy or terrible.

Questioning someone's lack of critical thinking skills is not the same as calling them crazy or terrible.

So has anybody been watching the debates? I've seen all four GOP debates. Maybe that's why I've been a little dubious about ... you know. Sorry.

I searched the blog and did not find any discussion of the "liberal media" myth or the treason accusations. We might try emailing him to ask him to comment.



Yes, his conservatism is not the same as what we're seeing in national politics these days.

I watched the most of the first, and a bit of the second.. they were such a circle jerk I couldn't stomach it.   I thought the MSNBC (or was it CNBC?) one might be better (since they both have an actual liberal bias), but that was just a snark fest.

I've found it pretty useful to read the fact checking and Politico analysis, though.

I think if I had to pick one, I think it'd be Rubio, but it's a bit choosing between 90s Image comics.