I never left the Republican Party - the Republican Party left Me!

 

Across America, Republican politicians are unreliable squishes

By Andrea Widburg www.americanthinker.com

There are a couple of admirable things about Democrat politicians: They never give up, no matter how many blows their initiatives initially receive, and they never abandon the party line or the party vote. In this, they differ significantly from Republican politicians, who love to campaign but often have no stomach for the fight: They’ll invariably drop something if it gets pushback and they’ll repeatedly abandon their party and cross the lines to vote with Democrats. You know in your gut that I’m right, and now CPAC has the data to support those gut feelings.

CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) did a study of all 50 state legislatures last year, and the results weren’t even close:

Republicans voted for conservative policies 77% of the time, while Democrats voted for liberal policies 87% of the time, according to the analysis of all 7,400 lawmakers in the 50 statehouses during last year’s legislative sessions.

The study by CPAC’s affiliated Center for Legislative Accountability concluded that Democrats were more likely to “stick together” on issues important to the party’s base, while Republicans “broke apart.”

“Republicans run on conservative promises, but after they win more of them abandon the tough votes on key conservative policies when compared to Democrats whose first rule is to stick together,” the group said. “Our analysis shows how moderate Republicans broke apart on key issues like parental choice in education, securing strong voter ID, or putting a stop to COVID mandates.”

Tell me the truth: Are you surprised? Without doing a study, I’m betting that 100% of you knew this was true. Heck, even if you’ve been ignoring your state legislature, you’ve seen this play out repeatedly in Congress.

The Republican party is famous for Mitt Romney, John McCain, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, George Bush Sr. and Jr., and a host of other people who rejoice under the label of “Republican,” but they really call the Uniparty their ideological home. When you stop and pay attention, what Uniparty really means is the Democrat party and its permanent bureaucracy in the Deep State. Meanwhile, on the Democrat side, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, to their credit, have held the line on the filibuster but, otherwise, they’re party-line voters down the line.

The most fascinating thing about the study, other than confirming what we already know, is learning where the squishiest Republicans live—and it’s not in Blue states. It’s in Red states:

Ranking among the 10 states with the most liberal Republican lawmakers were Mississippi, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Idaho. That’s despite Republicans holding strong majorities in those legislatures, and the state’s population overwhelmingly voting for Republican in election after election.

As a group, Mississippi Republican lawmakers had an average conservative score of 58%, making them less conservative than Republicans in New Jersey, Maryland, and Oregon. The state where Republicans voted most conservative was a swing state: Wisconsin.

Funnily enough, when Democrats have a majority in their state, they’re never squishes. Now, some of this could be because they don’t worry about elections. Once they gain control of the State house and the Secretary of State’s office, elections somehow always go their way. Go figure. Republicans may be a little less secure and may actually think that they have to keep all the voters happy, not just urban the base.

Democrats also don’t have to worry about the media undermining their agenda. With the media wind at their backs, they know that it’s always clear sailing. Republicans, who are always playing defense, start being plagued by self-doubt.

Another Democrat advantage is that they are, by nature, not individualists. They move and think as a pack, constantly trying to drive power to the biggest pack of all; namely, the state. Republicans actually bring different values to the table (especially on abortion) and that hampers their unity.

Fundamentally, though, there’s a major schism in the Republican party. While there are no moderate Democrats (they’re all radicals now), Republicans come in two varieties: The ones who owe fealty to the Constitution and the American citizen (i.e., the conservatives) and the ones who are loyal to corporations (i.e., the Chamber of Commerce crew). Now that Democrats own corporate America, the Chamber of Commerce crew is finding that it has more in common with Democrats than with conservatives.

Until voters wise up, we’ll keep having a Republican party split between conservatives and soft-Democrats, while the Democrats will continue to move in effective lockstep. In other words, conservatives lose.