The GOP's Suicide Caucus -- Were They All Tea Party?
This is a worthwhile article, though I don't understand how "suicidal" explains their decision that has brought us to this point.
How are they suicidal if they win? If they can strongly hold on to their districts? With 17 to win in 2014, I'd like to think that unrelenting direct canvassing in these districts is still worthwhile. These 80 Republicans might not be listed among "the vulnerable incumbents," but still, disabusing these districts' voters of the civic virtue of economic pain should be our Number One priority.
There's time to turn these districts at least purple. For all the Republican smugness about their 11 - 1 spending ratio in 2014, I think that Democrats can still show Republican voters that there are some community and national benefits that money just can't buy.
I promise to get out to Will and DuPage counties when campaign time comes around because that is where the bourgeois right wing foxbot racist yahoos live in my area. Howzabout you?
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/09/meadows-boehner-defund-obamacare-suicide-caucus-geography.html
An excerpt (paragraphing mine for readability): "...The members of the suicide caucus live in a different America from the one that most political commentators describe when talking about how the country is transforming. The average suicide-caucus district is seventy-five per cent white, while the average House district is sixty-three per cent white. Latinos make up an average of nine per cent of suicide-district residents, while the over-all average is seventeen per cent...
The districts also have slightly lower levels of education (twenty-five per cent of the population in suicide districts have college degrees, while that number is twenty-nine per cent for the average district)...even within the broader Republican Party, they represent a minority view, at least at the level of tactics (almost all Republicans want to defund Obamacare, even if they disagree about using the issue to threaten a government shutdown)...
On the most important policy questions, ones that most affect the national brand of the party, Boehner has lost his ability to control his caucus, and an ideological faction, aided by outside interest groups, can now set the national agenda..."
