By Rick Manning
In an interview with Breitbart News’ Robert Wilde, pollster Pat Caddell reported that, “The alienation among Republican voters is so high,” and that conservatively “a quarter to one-third of the Republican party are hanging by a thread from bolting.”
Caddell’s third and just released part of a poll of Republican voters reveals that the GOP faces an immediate existential threat over issues like immigration and health care, and their current leadership does not have the support of the voters to carry them through this perilous time.
The widely publicized first part of Caddell’s study released on Friday showed that 60 percent of Republican voters oppose John Boehner being Speaker in the upcoming session and 64 percent view him as being ineffective.
The second release revealed that, “only 16 percent of Republicans want both Boehner and McConnell elected to top leadership and basically 53 percent want neither and want someone new.”
The latest release shows that a shocking 84 percent of GOP voters and leaners are less likely to support the election of their Member of Congress if they allowed taxpayer money to be spent implementing President Obama’s amnesty plan.
The intensity of this position poses the real challenge to Republican lawmakers with 63 percent saying they would be much less likely to support someone who funded the amnesty plan and only 9 percent indicating strong support.
Anyone reading this study has to conclude that the canary in the mine shaft is already dead, and the Republican Party is in danger of making itself irrelevant unless elected leaders take bold action to change perceptions amongst those who elected them just two short months ago.
As House Republicans spend the next 24 hours contemplating who should be Speaker, they face the conundrum that Republican voters want change and vehemently oppose what is widely acknowledged to be the almost certain path of funding amnesty that will be negotiated by Republican leaders with President Obama.
The question is whether they will trust their own political fates into the hands of a Speaker who their own Republican voters don’t want, and believe is ineffective.
The People’s Poll was conducted among 602 voters who are Republican or voted Republican in the 2014 election. Interviews were conducted on both landlines and cell phones, December 26-30, 2014 with an MOE of +/- 4 percent.
Rick Manning is the vice president of public policy and communications of Americans for Limited Government.
