THEY HATE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, NOT REPUBLICAN IDEOLOGY

At The Washington Post, Scott Sullivan and Scott Clement make an important point about poll numbers that appear bad for the GOP:

Meet the haters.

We’re talking about the voters who've had it with all Washington politicians: President Obama, congressional Republicans and congressional Democrats. Despite their distaste for, well, everyone, when push comes to shove, these voters are lining up squarely behind GOP candidates for Congress.....

Seventy-two percent of voters who disapprove of the job Obama, congressional Democrats and congressional Republicans are doing say they’d vote for the GOP candidate for U.S. House in their district if the election were held today, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll released Tuesday. Just 14 percent say they'd vote for the Democrat....

Well, of course. As Sullivan and Clement note, 72% of these people are either Republicans or independents who lean Republican. It's quite likely that a large percentage of those independents are the teabaggiest of teabaggers -- it's very hip in that crowd to insist that you have no loyalty to either party, even if you've never voted for a Democrat in your life, and even if your fondest wish in life would be a takeover of the GOP by your teabag soul mates, followed by a similar takeover of America (usually described as "taking our country back").

I've said it before: when pollsters ask for respondents' opinions of the parties, they should tease out whether the right-leaners who disapprove of the GOP do so because they think it's not conservative enough. That's the group that will always vote GOP -- and it's a large group. In any race, that group will vote for the most right-wing candidate, who will inevitably be a Republican.

So, yeah, it's nice that the approval ratings of Republicans, and congressional Republicans in particular, are extremely low, and lower in nearly every poll than the approval ratings of Democrats and the president. But it doesn't mean what a lot of people think it means. A large number of the disapprovers see two unacceptably left-wing parties -- and always vote for the one they see as occasionally being just right on the ideological spectrum, a spot defined by the rest of us as "so far to the right it's almost off the edge."