From the National Journal:
Can the conservative base of the Republican Party peacefully coexist with independents and enable the GOP to return to power? That is a question that Democratic pollsters Stan Greenberg and Karl Agne posed in a recent Democracy Corps study of conservative Republicans in the South and independent voters in the North.
Greenberg and Agne organized two focus groups in the Atlanta area with middle-aged white voters who identified themselves as strong Republicans and who cast ballots for both GOP presidential nominee John McCain and a Republican congressional candidate in 2008. Based on those discussions, the pollsters concluded that conservative GOP base voters do not oppose Obama because of race but because they are deeply suspicious and fearful that he intends to impose a socialist government on the country. This view is compounded by "an almost siege-like mentality," Greenberg and Agne said, against the mainstream media and popular culture. By contrast, when Agne interviewed white, middle-aged, non-college-educated swing voters in Cleveland, he found that although they were still skeptical of Obama, they nonetheless hoped he might be able to achieve some of his goals.
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Republican pollster Whit Ayres said he read the Democracy Corps study and thought it "very interesting," but he discounted it, including its suggestion that the anxious Right on display in the Atlanta focus groups is the dominant faction in the GOP. "They tend to be the loudest and most intense Republicans," he said, "but they're not the largest group of Republicans, just like Democratic activists in the blogosphere are not the largest group of Democrats."
Ayres said that his polling with Resurgent Republic, a GOP research group that seeks to shape the public debate just as Democracy Corps does, has found that on a range of issues from the economy to terrorist investigations to health care, independents hold views that are more Republican than Democratic.
