Centerfield

I took the questionaire, and here are my answers:

1. Do you think the Republican Party has gone too far to the right? If so, on what issues? Name the two most important issues to you where the party has gone to the right?

NO

I don't like to answer this question either yes or no. The political spectrum is far more complex than such a simple question impies. On social issues, yes, too many Republicans wish to use the power of the state to enforce moral behavior, such as the fight over gay marriage and some's desire to write a constitutional ammendment to prevent it. On issues of the environment, the rejection of Kyoto is appropriate, but water and local pollution issues should be stronger. However, on taxation and budget issues, the Republicans have lost their way. Reagan-era supply siders do not have a single important positions in the Bush administration (Glenn Hubberd was the only one). Spending and congressional pork is out of control. Tax simplification and marginal rate cuts have been adabdonded for gimmicky deductions and economically unhealthy tax credits. If anything, the Republicans have taken over the Democratic style of taxation.

2. Do you think the Democratic Party has gone too far to the left? If so, on what issues? Name the two most important issues to you where the party has gone to the left?

YES

While the Republicans are too far to the right on the environment, the Democrats are too far to the left by pushing Kyoto. Signing onto it would be disasterous economically. A middle ground does exists on this, but neither party wants to get near it. As Republicans have moved left economically ever since Reagan, the Democrats seem to have denounced Clinton successes like free trade, deregulation, and moved leftward too. The socialist tendencies and rhetoric from many of the Democrats scares me a little, and it is hard to vote for them if they cannot see the benefits of lower margial tax rates. Given the choice between tax-and-spend Democrats and borrow-and-spend Republicans, I have to choose the barrowers over the taxers as borrowing is the less economically harmful than jacking up those tax rates to European levels.

3. Do you consider yourself a:

DEMOCRAT

4. Would you like to be kept informed on issues and what moderate Republican candidates are running across the country?

YES

5. Would you be willing to financially support our mission

YES

I took the survey as well.
1) Yes. The Republican Party today truly is not even the party of Reagan. Reagan would have never exploited social issues to the extent that many within the party seem to be willing to do. However, as the party has moved to the extreme right on cultural issues, they seem to have drifted to the left on fiscal issues.
2) Yes. They continue their drift. With a chance to put a moderate in control at the DNC, they chose someone who can only be viewed as part of the far left. I'm not sure of the wisdom in that decision.
3) I consider myself a Republican. (The first member of my family to register as such)
4) Yes.
5) Yes.

http://thross.012webpages.com is a hilarious site that criticizes both sides of the political spectrum

Well, clearly the GOP has gone too far to the right. There's Kansas, where they want to elevate creationism to the level of science and the AG wants to look at every woman's (of child bearing age) medical records.

There's this week's news that the Bush labor department entered into an agreement with WalMart to not only significantly reduce the already miniscule fines imposed by states for violations of child labor laws, but to also promise to give the WORLD'S LARGEST CORPORATION 15 days notice before even inspecting possible violations.

The GOP has gone off the deep end culturally and economically. It's fascinating, they refuse to acknowledge Darwin's theories regarding biology, but fully embrace them economically.

These are not nice people.

Democrats? Well I have to agree with jjayson. They bitch about deficit spending, but I remember in 2003 their cheif complaint about the medicare bill was IT DIDN'T SPEND ENOUGH MONEY!

I'll still vote democrat, but only because almost everyone in the GOP is insane.

There's Kansas, where they want to elevate creationism to the level of science and the AG wants to look at every woman's (of child bearing age) medical records.

Hey, don't bother to get the facts right, Tim, just make some extremely sweeping generalizations and apply 'em hyperbolically and indiscriminately!

Not that I want to defend the KS state school board (or five certain members of the nine, anyway) but the evolution thing is a regular here, and it's not driven by the GOP but by both GOP and Dem fundies in the hinterlands. The primary problem is state school board seat distribution by region instead of population, giving the hinterlands highly disproportional representation. And the issue is hardly unique to Kansas.

And Ghu knows I don't want to defend Phill Kline, who is IMHO a rather slimy piece of wasted protoplasm who deserves knocking around in the media, but your statement on medical records is so far over the top that I just gotta note that it's utter bullshit. He's trying to get medical records on several dozen late-term abortion patients as a grandstand play to the pro-lifers--and he's not very damn likely to get them at all.

For a similarly "factual" statement I could say that Democrats in California want all babies aborted, all evangelicals forcibly deprogrammed to agnosticism, and the government to have all our money to distribute under Marxist doctrine.

jjayson,

Governor Whitman makes the same points about Kyoto in her book, that you did in your comment.

The question I'd like to ask is if they would consider ranked-choice general elections in order to defang the wingnuts of their disproportionate influence through the primaries. To demonstrate why, consider Pennsylvania's Senate race this past year. In that race, the incumbent Arlen Spector, a moderate, faced a primary challenge by the right's choice Pat Toomey and then a general election challenge by Joe Hoeffel.

Suppose that the far right did succeed in sending a message to moderates by defeating Spector in the primary, but that majority rule voting was in effect in which voters rank each of the candidates on the ballot and the winner is the one who defeats all other candidates in a head-to-head matchup based on those rankings. Under those circumstances, Spector would have been able to run in the general election anyway without hurting his party by taking votes away from Toomey. In all likelihood, there would have been four ways voters would have ranked the three candidates:

Toomey, Spector, Hoeffel
Hoeffel, Spector, Toomey
Spector, Hoeffel, Toomey
Spector, Toomey, Hoeffel.

In head-to-head comparison, Spector is preferred over either candidate in three out of four cases, and thus would be nearly certain to win.

I have asked on mypartytoo.com if they would support such an electoral system with that calculation in mind, but have not received a response.

Six combos are possible with three candidates, as any trifecta-playing track bettor can tell you. (3-horse box on a $2 wager base is a $12 ticket.) The odds of each of the combos is a different story.

Aussie ballot would indeed be interesting, but I don't know that we could get the parties to go for it. Besides, some of our election commissions have trouble enough with straight head-to-head check-offs. Aussie ballot tallying might be beyond them. As in "light years." But we could always get track Totalizers(tm) to tally the ballots...and take side bets at the same time to pay for the elections!

While technically there are six possible combinations, in all practicality, any voter who prefers Toomey to Spector will also prefer Spector to Hoeffel and likewise voters prefering Hoeffel to Spector would also prefer Spector to Toomey, thus eliminating, or reducing to negligibility, two possibilities. As an anecdote, consider a conversation I had last fall with a friend of mine from Pennsylvania who was complaining about a litany of offenses by the Democrats, such as opposing legal reform, and added that Spector was just as bad. He finished by saying, "Now that Spector won the primary, I have no choice but to support him." I have no data to support my contention that exceptions to that viewpoint among Toomey supporters are rare, but I highly doubt that many exceptions exist.

What do you mean by Aussie ballots? Are you refering to instant runoff (IRV)? I actually am not advocating IRV for several reasons. For one, IRV requires aggregating each voter's entire vote, so that with three candidates, it would require aggregating each of the six possibilities, growing factorially with additional candidates. What I advocate requires only aggregating how voters would vote in each possible two-way matchup, in this case Spector or Hoeffel, Spector or Toomey, and Hoeffel or Toomey. For three candidates, there are three matchups, growing with the square of the number of candidates.

Further, IRV places too much importance on each voter's first choice vote. For instance, excluding the possibity of voters ranking Spector last, if Toomey and Hoeffel were each to get 40-45% of the first choice votes, Spector would be eliminated, with the winner determined by who has more votes after Spector's second-choice votes are distributed. This would be the case as well if they both got 33-35%, even though Spector would wind up beating both of them by close to 2-to-1 in a head-to-head matchup (this is why after decades of using IRV, Australia still has a political duopoly with one nominee per party). From a centrist point of view, eliminating someone like Spector in this manner would not be a good thing, and centrists are the ones who lose most from first-choice only balloting.

"Hey, don't bother to get the facts right, Tim"

I used Kansas as an example of GOP extremism. They certainly aren't alone.

But regarding facts. The facts are Kansas has a crackpot AG with an agenda very similar to John Ashcroft and he's a republican. It's also a fact he does want to look at every woman's medical records if he can get access to them. In addition, the issue with evolution vs. creationism, ID or whatever you want to call it is an overwhelmingly right-wing Christian battle against the mainstream all across the country, and this demographic group is the single most powerful element of the GOP. The primary difference is that in Kansas the party has actually come closer to achieving their objective.

Now if you want to state there are elected democrats on the record who want to increase the number of abortions or forcibly change someone's religious beliefs go ahead. I'll be glad to concede the point if you can provide proof.

But my motivation isn't to engage in meaningless dialogue merely for the sake of argument. We're all too busy for that (that's why it took me almost a week to get back to this discussion), but to point out the obvious, the GOP has extreme positions on cultural and economic issues. Nothing anyone has said on this thread has provided evidence to the contrary.