Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog has a post on the most recent poll results for the GOP in this thread:
1. Donald Trump: 24% (down two points from last month)
2. Ben Carson: 23% (up five points)
3. Ted Cruz: 10% (up two points)
4. Marco Rubio: 9% (unchanged)
5. Jeb Bush: 8% (up one point)
6. Carly Fiorina: 5% (down four points)
6. Mike Huckabee: 5% (up two points)
8. Rand Paul: 3% (up one point)
…But it’s the top of the GOP standings that are hard to overlook. Indeed, the pattern should cause some consternation among GOP leaders. Over the summer, Donald Trump created several controversies for himself, making outlandish comments about all kinds of people and issues, and each time, a variety of pundits said, “Now he’s gone too far.” And soon after, in each instance, Trump’s poll numbers went up.
More recently, however, it’s Carson who consistently finds himself in the news for making comments that raise questions about his stability and connection to reality. And yet, the more unhinged Carson appears, the greater his support in national Republican polling.
It says something important about the perspective of GOP voters, and just as importantly, it creates an incentive for Republican presidential candidates to be as reckless and irresponsible as humanly possible.
This is the mirror of the constituents of today’s GOP – but will it be tomorrow’s? The implications of the various stunts pulled by the occupants of the entire poll, where the more ridiculous the statement, the more support the instigator gains, indicates the GOP’s core is located, increasingly, on the fringes of American society. Granted, our increasingly fragmented society makes this easier than it did in decades past, where the fringe was relegated to lithographic presses, late night dinners, and the occasional radio show, but at some point the saner elements of the GOP will either, from self-disgust, assert themselves and kick the bums out – or leave themselves, vowing never to vote for the bums. Either way, the team politics would founder, and with it the ship the fringe-right has been riding.
And this would be a shame, since a single party does not debate well with itself, even the Democrats. The movement towards ‘starve the beast’ is having a deleterious impact on the United States in far too many ways; worse, few adherents will be persuaded of this viewpoint as the defenders are quite inventive of not only persuasive technique, but even facts. There is a lot of debate about the causes of this. I’ll pass on figuring that out tonight.
