Pew Finds 15 Percentage Point Drop in Self-Identified Gops

A new Pew poll has detected a “dramatic shift” in party identification over the past five years:

[In 2002] Republicans and Democrats were at rough parity. Now, 50 percent of those surveyed identified with or leaned toward Democrats, whereas 35 percent aligned with Republicans.

What’s more, the survey found, public attitudes are drifting toward Democrats’ values: Support for government aid to the disadvantaged has grown since the mid-1990s, skepticism about the use of military force has increased and support for traditional family values has decreased.

While Bush’s devastation of his party has isolated the rightwing’s base — a coalition of paranoid fringe types, Christian nationalists and Dittoheads who have nowhere else to go — it has not swelled the ranks of the Democratic Party.

A sizable group within the 15 percent who have moved away from the GOP are socially liberal, fiscally conservative suburbanites — many of whom felt burned by the Republicans’ impeachment of Pres. Clinton over a sex lie but gave the GOP no less than three more chances, voting for Bush in 2000, the GOP Congress in 2002 and Bush again in 2004. As you can imagine, these folks have had it with the Grand Old Party.

And yet it appears they are giving Rudolph Giuliani his current lead over John McCain. Still, it’s theoretically possible they might be convinced by Hillary Clinton or maybe even Barak Obama, providing they keep their distance from the moonbat left.