Poll Shows Republicans Increasingly Prefer One-Party Government

In the Gallup poll released Monday, 40 percent of Republicans say it’s better for one party to run both branches, an increase over the 24 percent who said so a year ago.

Congressman Charlie Dent’s open agreement to work with Democrats to defeat Republican ideals and “deal with attacks from the flank” make it clear what a few of us have thought all along: Dent, like most “mainstream” Republican party hacks, is really a Democrat in faded Republican clothing.

“But in addition to those immediate and practical political desires, many Americans, particularly independents, seem to have normative concerns about giving one party too much power”.

It is all one long, continuous plague of Republican extremism that began quietly when the party moved west and south in its orientation…But it did not break into truly virulent, systemic frenzy until Bill Clinton got elected in 1992. Twenty-four percent of respondents this year, irrespective of party, prefer a divided government, a figure consistent with polls over the past 12 years.

Independents this year are more likely than last year to say it makes no difference whether the president and Congress are the same party – 45 percent this year compared to 39 percent last year.

“No difference” remains the most common response, “as it typically has been”, according to Gallup, at 38 percent.

Gallup said the change makes Republicans’ views similar to Democrats’ views, which are essentially unchanged from a year ago.

To a large degree, their opinions are influenced by partisans’ desire to maximize their favored party’s power in the current political environment. That attitude would explain why recent eras of one-party government – including 1993-1994, 2002-2006 and 2009-2010 – were short-lived.

The shift may reflect the upcoming presidential election as well as continued inaction on certain key conservative issues even with GOP control of both the House and Senate. Instead, and it’s hard to fault them entirely for their sense of responsibility, the Democrats chose largely to ignore the dance of the madmen at center stage and fulfill a few sense of obligation to the country. On the left, the pink bars (known as a histogram) show the distribution of House Republicans from the late 1960s on an widely respected scale of ideological measurement known as DW-Nominate; the higher the bars, the more members of Congress who occupy that space.

5Democratic voters are also divided on whether it’s more important for a presidential candidate to have “experience” or “new ideas.”