{"id":10344,"date":"2009-10-24T02:26:26","date_gmt":"2009-10-24T02:26:26","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2009-10-24T02:56:42","modified_gmt":"2009-10-24T02:56:42","slug":"proof-that-californias-republicans-are-crazy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/2009\/10\/24\/proof-that-californias-republicans-are-crazy\/","title":{"rendered":"Proof That California&#8217;s Republicans Are Crazy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/s15.photobucket.com\/albums\/a397\/utbriancl\/?action=view&#038;current=npat_boxplot_states_parties_mcmc.png\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i15.photobucket.com\/albums\/a397\/utbriancl\/npat_boxplot_states_parties_mcmc.png\" border=\"0\" alt=\"NPAT\" align=right width=350><\/a>Do you remember the 2008 primary, when all of the nation&#8217;s media was in love with talking about how California&#8217;s Republicans were sooooo liberal. &nbsp;And remember how us Democrats here in California laughed at that notion? Well, here&#8217;s some proof.<\/p>\n<p>Some math\/political nerds at the University of Chicago did some analysis of the two parties in each state Legislature and compared them with other states and the Congress. I&#8217;m clearly not doing the math of that justice, but you can find <a href=\"http:\/\/bshor.wordpress.com\/2009\/10\/21\/scozzafava-is-a-conservative-republican-in-new-york\/\">the full details at the author Boris Shor&#8217;s blog<\/a>. &nbsp;Apparently he has a paper coming out soon that will explain a lot more about how he got to these numbers. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>But for a general explanation, left is liberal and right is conservative, with 0 being the base. &nbsp;As you can see California&#8217;s legislative Dems are amongst the most liberal, and are about the same as several other states that you&#8217;d expect to see us tied with: New York and Washington, and some that you wouldn&#8217;t Utah and Arizona. &nbsp;But to those who say that you&#8217;d expect California Republicans to be moderate: hear me now and believe me later: They are as wingnut as you get.<\/p>\n<p>No other state is even close to our wingnut Republicans. &nbsp;They are waaaay to the right of even states like Georgia and Wyoming. No other state is really even close.<\/p>\n<p>Some will blame this on districting, but I will instead point them to the simple fact that we Californians have self-sorted ourselves better than any other state. &nbsp;Democrats hang out in certain counties, and Republicans in others. And the Republican primary electorate consistently organizes around the most conservative candidate.<\/p>\n<p>And so we get our right-wing Republicans in the Legislature and nothing actually gets done to help the state. Yay, us!<\/p>\n<p><b>UPDATE<\/b>: On a related note, the Republicans have now reached <a href=\"http:\/\/politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com\/2009\/10\/23\/cnn-poll-gop-favorable-rating-lowest-in-25-years\/\">a new low in popularity<\/a> across the nation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/s15.photobucket.com\/albums\/a397\/utbriancl\/?action=view&#038;current=npat_boxplot_states_parties_mcmc.png\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i15.photobucket.com\/albums\/a397\/utbriancl\/npat_boxplot_states_parties_mcmc.png\" border=\"0\" alt=\"NPAT\" align=right width=350><\/a>Do you remember the 2008 primary, when all of the nation&#8217;s media was in love with talking about how California&#8217;s Republicans were sooooo liberal. &nbsp;And remember how us Democrats here in California laughed at that notion? Well, here&#8217;s some proof.<\/p>\n<p>Some math\/political nerds at the University of Chicago did some analysis of the two parties in each state Legislature and compared them with other states and the Congress. I&#8217;m clearly not doing the math of that justice, but you can find <a href=\"http:\/\/bshor.wordpress.com\/2009\/10\/21\/scozzafava-is-a-conservative-republican-in-new-york\/\">the full details at the author Boris Shor&#8217;s blog<\/a>. &nbsp;Apparently he has a paper coming out soon that will explain a lot more about how he got to these numbers. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>But for a general explanation, left is liberal and right is conservative, with 0 being the base. &nbsp;As you can see California&#8217;s legislative Dems are amongst the most liberal, and are about the same as several other states that you&#8217;d expect to see us tied with: New York and Washington, and some that you wouldn&#8217;t Utah and Arizona. &nbsp;But to those who say that you&#8217;d expect California Republicans to be moderate: hear me now and believe me later: They are as wingnut as you get.<\/p>\n<p>No other state is even close to our wingnut Republicans. &nbsp;They are waaaay to the right of even states like Georgia and Wyoming. No other state is really even close.<\/p>\n<p>Some will blame this on districting, but I will instead point them to the simple fact that we Californians have self-sorted ourselves better than any other state. &nbsp;Democrats hang out in certain counties, and Republicans in others. And the Republican primary electorate consistently organizes around the most conservative candidate.<\/p>\n<p>And so we get our right-wing Republicans in the Legislature and nothing actually gets done to help the state. Yay, us!<\/p>\n<p><b>UPDATE<\/b>: On a related note, the Republicans have now reached <a href=\"http:\/\/politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com\/2009\/10\/23\/cnn-poll-gop-favorable-rating-lowest-in-25-years\/\">a new low in popularity<\/a> across the nation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[87],"tags":[664,1124],"class_list":["post-10344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-87","tag-664","tag-1124"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-2GQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}