The Republican Party Enters Its Own McGovern Era

More thoughts on this after Passover, but for now … just read it and weep. Andy Kohut, director of Pew's public opinion program, summarizes his polling of the huge gap between the Republican rank-and-file and everybody else in the country.

In my decades of polling, I recall only one moment when a party had been driven as far from the center as the Republican Party has been today.

The outsize influence of hard-line elements in the party base is doing to the GOP what supporters of Gene McCarthy and George McGovern did to the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s — radicalizing its image and standing in the way of its revitalization.