Overview
This first Democracy Corps national survey of the New Year shows Republicans at risk at every level.[1] On the ballot, Republicans are in serious danger. For the first time since the 2010 election, Democrats have taken the lead in the congressional vote and this poll shows that third-party defections on the Presidential ballot could prove devastating for the Republicans. The intensity gap has shifted in the Democrats’ favor and Democrats have moved closer to parity on the economy, reaching their highest level of trust since October 2010.
Voters are watching
More than half of all voters (53 percent) say that the more they watch the Republicans in Congress, the less they like what the Republicans have to offer; only 39 percent say they like it more – a 14 point margin. The country is equally repelled by the Republican presidential contest (53 to 38 percent). The style of their politics and governance is driving away independents. And more than half of white non-college voters who were key to Republicans wins in 2010[2] do not like what the Republicans in Congress are offering–a staggering result.
Republicans in Congress lead race to the bottom
John Boehner and the Republicans in Congress are leading the crash.
◦For the first time in two years, Democrats are winning the Congressional ballot (48 to 45 percent), the result of a major shift among independents. Democrats are now winning independents by 6 points – a net 13-point shift among independents since October and a net 23-point shift since August. In June, Democrats were losing independent men by a margin of 29 points. Democrats are now winning this demographic by two points. In 2010, Democrats lost seniors by a 23-point margin. That gap has closed to just 10 points.
◦John Boehner’s favorability has fallen off significantly–43 percent now give the Speaker a negative rating, with three in 10 voters giving him a very negative rating (under 25 on our 100-point scale).
◦Two-thirds of all voters now say they disapprove of this Republican Congress and its approval rating has hit a new low in our tracking–25 percent. The decline has come from a complete drop-off of those who “strongly approve” of this Republican Congress–down to 8 percent, also the lowest in our tracking.
◦The Republicans have lost their advantage on the economy. Democrats now trail Republicans on which party would do a better job on the economy by only two points, a net 5-point shift since October. While most improvements in this poll are due to Republicans faltering, here Democrats have gained 5 points on trust to handle the economy.
The Presidential Contest Full of Peril
The race for president remains very close, though showing the first signs of improvement for the president. With his approval rating at 44 percent and vote at 48 percent, you have a close contest. But Obama’s strong support is up 4 points, has more winnable voters than Romney and has made some important recent gains with key swing groups. Obama is now winning 39 percent of white-non college voters, his highest total among that group in a year. Among independents, Obama now wins by two points –a net 10-point increase since October and an astonishing 18-point increase since August.
Romney is not popular – only 30 percent of all voters, and only 26 percent of independents, give him a warm, favorable rating. Obama, on the other hand, remains personally popular, with nearly 50 percent giving him a warm, favorable rating. As a result, Mitt Romney has not been able to energize voters. Voters, especially Republicans, are ready to bolt to independent candidates in large numbers — indeed, remarkable numbers.
Our poll shows that as a third-party candidate, Ron Paul would take 19 percent of the vote in a matchup against Obama and Romney. Almost all of this comes at Romney’s expense. Nearly tied in a head-to-head matchup against the President, Romney’s vote plummets when Paul is added to the ballot, losing 13 points of his vote share.
We also tested matchups between Obama, Romney, and three independent candidates: Ron Paul, Donald Trump, and Michael Bloomberg. Together, these three take 24 percent of the vote. While Romney’s support drops off in the face of a third-party challenge, Obama remains strong at 42 percent (10 points ahead of Romney). Thirty-two percent of Romney voters in the two-way matchup defect to one of the three independent candidates; only 12 percent of Obama voters defect.
These independent candidates have traction in key subgroups – 30 percent of white non-college and 35 percent of suburban voters chose one of the three independent candidates in this 5-way matchup.
Intensity Gap
We have seen a major change on intensity. Obama and Romney have equal numbers of strong supporters — with strong support for the President up 4 points since October. Conversely, strong support for Romney among white non-college voters has decreased 5 points since October. Additionally, there is growing opposition to Republicans – strong disapproval of the Republican Congress is now 9 points higher than strong disapproval of President Obama.

Harold Meyerson’s WaPo op-ed, “Obama vs. Romney: Who will blue-collar Americans hate less?” raises what may prove to be the most important strategic consideration of 2012. Meyerson sees both Romney and Obama hobbled with elitist images that will be very difficult for either candidate to shake:

…A Romney-Obama contest would pit the very personification of the two elites that generations of Americans have been brought up to loathe: the paper-shuffling, unfeeling banker, utterly out of touch with most Americans’ concerns, and who comes from inherited wealth to boot; and the cool, academic social engineer who is culturally estranged from the white working class and isn’t opposed to governments helping racial minorities.

Meyerson limns Romney’s image with devastating accuracy

Romney is the model of everything in modern American capitalism that makes people pine for the kinder, gentler capitalism that his father personified. As the head of American Motors, George Romney, Mitt’s pop, made cars. Mitt makes deals. As Michael Tomasky noted this week, George Romney refused a bonus of $100,000 after American Motors had a good year in 1960, saying that no top executive needed to make more than his $225,000 annual salary ($1.4 million today). Romney the lesser has a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions for his work in private equity, extracting vast amounts of money from the firms — successful and not — that Bain Capital took over. The younger gets all manner of tax breaks that his father never could, apparently availing himself of the special rate for private equity and hedge fund managers that, he admits, has brought his rate down to around 15 percent.
Worse yet, Romney comes off as a walking, talking compendium of upper-class cluelessness. His offer of a $10,000 bet to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, his dismissal of his yearly speaker fees (around $370,000) as pocket money, his equation of corporations and people — these and other off-the-gold-cufflink comments depict a guy whose points of intersection with the lives of most Americans are few and far between. A rich kid who became a bean counter: Could anything be worse?

But Obama’s image in blue collar America is also problematic:

In the demonology of the American right, however, there surely is something worse: a liberal, cultural elitist who sees — from the ivory tower — the mission of government as catering to (lazy) minorities…Barack Obama seems sent by central casting to embody the target of neo-classic, racist right populism. Think of George Wallace’s attacks on not only minorities but also on their enablers — “pointy-head bureaucrats,” professors and elitist journalists…who had no understanding of or sympathy for the white working class…
In his own way, Obama has as little of the common touch as Romney. In the faux populism of the right, his lack of affinity for certain blue-collar pleasures (He can’t bowl! He doesn’t hunt!), his concern for climate change and other supposed abstractions, are all depicted as signs of contempt for blue-collar lives. Add Rick Santorum’s attack on Obama’s remark that it would be a good thing if every American went to college — a comment, Santorum said, that reeked of hubris and elitism by denigrating workers — to Gingrich’s labeling of Obama as the food-stamp president, and it’s abundantly apparent how the right will go after Obama this fall.

Meyerson notes that “The white working class may be a shrinking segment of the American electorate, but it’s still massive ‘ and “…these voters have moved steadily into the Republican column.” On a more optimistic note, Meyerson observes, “But with Romney as Obama’s opponent, the surge of blue-collar whites into Republican ranks may be smaller this year than GOP strategists have anticipated.” Meyerson concludes that 2012 seems ripe for a third party challenge “on the populist right,” more likely a Gingrich or Santorum than Paul.
Dems can hope that Meyerson has overstated the problems with Obama’s image among white blue collar voters. But the wise course would be to work on improving it.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The political fumbling by Christian conservatives has been even worse this presidential cycle than it was in 2008, when their blood-enemy, John McCain, won the top spot on the Republican ticket. The Christian Right’s fatal failure this time was its inability to form a consensus behind a single candidate. Last weekend’s Texas conclave of religious conservatives, engineered by Family Research Center president and Christian Right warhorse Tony Perkins, initially appeared to have generated a united front behind Rick Santorum. But almost immediately, Newt Gingrich supporters challenged the results, and the united front quickly crumbled. With polls indicating no surge for Santorum in the state, Perkins’ gambit looks likely to fail–catastrophically, in fact, since it mainly benefited Mitt Romney, the one candidate hardly any Christian Right leader supports.
But if it’s entirely fair to point out that the once-indomitable Christian Right has botched the contest for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, it’s another thing altogether to conclude, as the esteemed historian Michael Kazin did earlier this week, that the Christian Right’s days of national influence have finally expired. It is true that they have been less conspicuous in this campaign, and less united in candidate preferences. But if they haven’t been able to pull their muscle behind a single candidate, that’s not a sign that they are on the wane–it’s a sign that, as far as the Republican Party is concerned, they have already won.
Look at the potential nominees: Unlike 2008, no candidate in the field is pro-choice by any definition. Only Ron Paul seems reluctant to enact a national ban on same-sex marriage. Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum. and Herman Cain have been vocal in fanning the flames of Islamophobia; again, only Paul has bothered to dissent to any significant degree.
Mitt Romney, of course, has a history on cultural issues that instills mistrust among many on the Christian Right. But his current positions bring him entirely in accord with social conservative priorities, and if he were elected, he would enter office more committed to Christian Right goals than any president in history. And if he is the nominee, he will likely choose a running-mate (and potential successor) who will, like McCain’s in 2008 (after social conservatives essentially vetoed his first and second choices), delight the Christian Right.
But regardless of its residual power within the Republican Party (which he acknowledges), Kazin believes the Christian Right is on the wane because it is increasingly out of touch with public opinion, and on the wrong side of generational trends. And when it comes to same-sex marriage, Kazin is probably correct: Although majority support for same-sex marriage rights remains a distant prospect in some states, the positive direction of public opinion is clear and–given the close direct relationship of age and likelihood to oppose same-sex marriage–irreversible.
But on the issue most important to the Christian Right’s foot soldiers, abortion, it’s not at all clear the Christian Right is losing. Kazin cites the 2011 defeat of the Personhood Amendment in Mississippi as a sign of anti-choice weakness. In fact, it’s remarkable that such an initiative–which would ban not only all abortions, but Plan B contraception, intrauterine devices, and arguably oral contraceptives–did as well as it did (a similar amendment was crushed by nearly a three-to-one margin in Colorado in 2010). More illustrative of the current state of play is the passage by seven states, (with legislation pending in many others, of so-called “fetal pain” legislation essentially banning abortion after twenty or twenty-two weeks of pregnancy.
Even more significantly, none of the major national reproductive rights organizations have gone to federal court to challenge these laws, which clearly violate Supreme Court precedents. Why? Because they legitimately fear that the Court would not only validate these laws, as it did with respect to so-called “partial-birth abortion” statutes in 2007, but would use the occasion to partially overturn Roe v. Wade and other the other decisions that establish and protect the constitutional right to choose. And that’s with the current Supreme Court. There is zero doubt that the next Supreme Court opening filled by a Republican president will produce a Justice who will be at least as hostile to the right to choose as George W. Bush appointees Roberts and Alito.
Aside from fetal pain bills, anti-choicers, particularly after the 2010 elections, have succeeded in many states in enacting restrictions and conditions on abortion providers that have seriously eroded reproductive rights, particularly for poor women. In general, the anti-abortion movement is showing a degree of sophistication that indicates it has evolved beyond the days of bloody fetus posters and physical assaults on abortion providers.
And on abortion, unlike same-sex marriage, there are few if any signs that generational trends will greatly move public opinion in a more progressive direction; voters under thirty are at most only marginally more likely to be pro-choice than their parents, and evangelical conservative youth are, if anything, more devoted to the anti-choice cause than their elders. The right to choose remains fragile, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.
That brings me to a final argument of Kazin’s: that the Christian Right is literally dying off, via the aging of its leaders and followers alike. You could, of course, argue that this is true of the entire Republican Party, which now relies disproportionately on older voters. Perhaps in the long run the future does belong to the progressive forces that showed such strong support among young and minority voters for Barack Obama in 2008. But it’s cold comfort in the short run, in which older voters remain significantly more likely to vote.
Yes, the warhorses of the Christian Right are showing their age, but a younger generation of culture warriors, some more radical than their elders, are just beginning to come into view. The Christian Right has been buried many times by secular observers since its advent as a powerful political movement in the late 1970s. It’s far too early to write yet another obituary.

This latest New New York Times poll showing President Obama’s “vulnerability with swing voters” also inadvertently underscores the need to clarify distinctions between “swing voters,” self-identified “Independents” and GOP or Dem-leaning “independents.” It might also be helpful to know what percent of these categories qualify as “low-information” voters and who they are. Perhaps the most relevant sentence in the NYT report by Jeff Zeleny and Dalia Sussman: “The poll found that 28 percent of the public says the economy is getting better, which is the biggest sense of optimism found in a Times/CBS News poll since last February.”
Check out “Welcome to Low Country: A Compendium of South Carolina Political Ads” at Times Swampland and be glad, very glad that Dems don’t have to worry about our nominee’s participation in butt-ugly presidential primaries.
Ron Paul isn’t laughing at the Colbert thing.
Michael Tomasky’s Daily Beast post “Newt’s Racist Surge May Sink Romney in South Carolina” hits it straight. Looks to me like Newt’s “food stamp president” comment was likely a lazer-targeted ploy to take a big bite out of the bigoted segment of Paul’s constituency.
As damaging as Mitt’s 15% effective tax rate may be, Dems ought to think about a creative ad targeting high turnout seniors, addressing “Romney’s Unorthodox IRA” as reported in the Wall St. Journal by Mark Maremont. Maybe quote from Maremont’s “Mr. Romney reported his IRA produced income between $1.5 million and $8.5 million from the beginning of 2010 until Aug. 12 of last year…Mr. Romney’s IRA includes holdings in Bain entities based in offshore locations, including one Cayman Islands entity that Mr. Romney listed as having a value between $5 million and $25 million.” Punch line: “So, how’s your retirement plan doing?”
Will Perry’s fold help Newt? Will Santorum get a sympathy bump in SC?
Romney is working the potentially-powerful military services-veteran-military industries vote in SC, but it’s fragmented nonetheless, according to “Influential military vote in South Carolina split” by Reuters correspondent Colleen Jenkins.
Gary Weiss explains “Why Romney is Obama’s dream opponent ” at Salon.com. Says Weiss: “This isn’t the invention of the liberal media. It’s Romney’s chickens coming home to roost. It’s going to stick. So when you see the Newt Gingrich super-PAC’s half-hour video describing what happened when “Mitt Romney came to town,” that is just an appetizer. The banquet follows in the fall, if and when Mitt gets the nomination God willing, and the Democrats start running against him.”
The GOP prez field takes some brutal hits in this collection of David Horsey’s political cartoons.

This article by Democratic political strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The last few weeks of the Republican Presidential road show has been dominated by discussion of Mitt Romney’s career as head of a Wall Street private equity firm — Bain Capital. Most people who enter politics have some previous career in the private sector — especially if they’re wealthy.
But Mitt Romney’s career on Wall Street — which he apparently hoped would allow him to tout his credentials as a “job creator” — will instead weigh down his election hopes like a massive millstone. There are six reasons why:
1). First and most important, attacks on Romney’s history at Bain are not “attacks on free enterprise” — or being “anti-business.” They are important for what they communicate about Mitt Romney and his values and the contrast that it poses with President Obama.
Barack Obama – like Mitt Romney — earned a degree at Harvard — and all of the opportunities that afforded. But when he graduated from law school, Obama went to work helping workers in the shadow of closed -down steel mills. Romney made millions for himself closing down steel mills.
The point is not just that workers were laid off, or jobs were outsourced — though they were. The point is not whether some of the ventures Romney funded succeeded and others failed. The point is that the impact of Romney’s business activity on the lives of ordinary people was incidental to his one and only goal: making huge sums of money for himself and a small group of his partners and investors.
Romney’s idea of success was embodied in that picture from two decades ago, with Romney at the center, surrounded by a squadron of Wall Street sharpies with money coming out of their pockets, their mouths and ears.
The point of the Bain story is that Romney would do whatever he could legally do to make money for himself and his crew. The effect of his decisions on the lives of ordinary people — or even the businesses in which they invested — was simply irrelevant. If shifting jobs overseas would make him and his friends more money – fine. If Bain could make millions by loading up a business with debt and bleeding it of cash — that was fine too — even if it meant that the business itself was ultimately forced to close. If buying a business and chopping it up into parts for resale would make him more money — so be it.
Improving the lives of ordinary workers — or of local communities — was never his goal. His goal was to make millions and millions of dollars for himself — often at other people’s expense. Instead of viewing ordinary workers as human beings who were parts of a team, he viewed them as “factors of production” — assets to be used when they helped him make money — objects to be discarded when that would fatten his bottom line.
Americans want a President who understands and cares about ordinary people — that’s not the Mitt Romney of Bain Capital.
2). If you were the Republican Party, you couldn’t pick a worse time to nominate a candidate with a resume as one of Wall Street’s “Masters of the Universe.”

Read more…

It’s still very early in the new year, but were there an award for GOP meme-propagation in the MSM, I’d bet on Politico’s “Partisan Washington: Obama’s broken promise” by Carrie Budoff Brown and Jonathan Allen.
I’ve read other articles by these writers that seemed balanced enough. But to me, this one has an odious whiff of political bias in an ostensibly non-partisan publication. I assume that the authors know that Obama has bent over backwards to accommodate GOP leaders, so much so that he has lost progressive supporters. The bias favoring Republicans in the post could be more in the editing, as suggested by the headline. Regardless, the article’s argument, though unconvincing, is heavily weighted against President Obama.
The authors do acknowledge that “For Obama, like his predecessors, the [bipartisanship] promise was impossible to keep without buy-in from the rest of Washington.” Though a few Democrats are quoted for ‘balance,’ however, the post leans more heavily on anti-Obama hyperbole like “The tales of perceived insults are legion” and “He stunned Republicans with the recess appointments, but they were only the latest aggravation,” presumably to get readers all dewey-eyed about the tenderness of Republicans’ hurt feelings.
The article faults Obama for not trying hard enough “to build relationships” with GOP leaders, even though he has dined, met, called and played golf with them. This particular Republican complaint is reminiscent of Newt’s hissy-fit when he had to exit Air Force One from the back door in ’95 during the Clinton administration. Only today’s GOP clearly doesn’t need a social snub to obstruct all legislative compromise.
Like every president, Obama can be faulted for his shortcomings. But the GOP meme that Obama hasn’t been willing to compromise is a dubious stretch. Few unbiased observers would hang the onus of failure to achieve bipartisanship on the President more than House and Senate Republicans.
The article conveniently ignores or glosses over the GOP’s knee-jerk filibusters, the Republican blocking of once-routine presidential appointments, the much larger number of recess appointments by all recent Republican presidents, GOP Rep. Joe Wilson’s “you lie” tantrum during the President’s address to a joint session of congress in ’09 and the GOP leaderships’ naked admissions that ‘destroying’ Obama is job one etc. And while ‘Blue Dogs’ and other moderate Democrats cross party lines regularly in congressional votes, there aren’t any ‘Red Dogs,’ are there?
With benefit of hindsight, there are undoubtedly some things Obama could have done better to reduce partisan polarization. But blaming him for not trying hard enough is a lot closer to GOP propaganda than an unbiased evaluation. I’m all for partisan editorializing, left and right. But it shouldn’t masquerade as unbiased journalism.

More evidence of a Romney cakewalk to the GOP nomination going forward at Nate Silver’s five thirty eight blog.
So, how did the GOP frontrunner celebrate MLK Day? According to Amanda Peterson Beadle, writing at Nation of Change, “Mitt Romney plans to tout his extreme immigration positions during a campaign stop in South Carolina today — with Kris Kobach, the author of Arizona’s and Alabama’s immigration laws, at his side…But as extreme as Romney’s immigration stances have been, campaigning with an anti-immigrant official with ties to a hate group on Martin Luther King Day is beyond the pale.”
Eric Pape lays bare the cluelessness of Romney’s Euro-bashing at ForeignPolicy.com, riffing on Mitt’s insistence that President Obama “wants to turn America into a European-style social welfare state” in stark contrast to Mitt’s steely determination to “ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity.” Pape notes for example, that “Since the global economic crisis kicked in, French unemployment increased by about 25 percent. (Then again, American unemployment increased by about 50 percent in that same period — and the U.S. rate is higher, at 8.5 percent, than the averaged unemployment rate of the eurozone’s two largest economies, France and Germany).”
Turns out the low information voter thing is a pretty big problem for Dems, especially when it comes to knowing what the GOP candidates are about, according to a recent Pew Research poll. Dems got work to do.
Michael C. Dawson has a thoughtful and informative rumination on “The Future of Black Politics” at the Boston Review, the lead essay of a forum with nine other experts on the topic.
While at the Boston Review, check out Stephen Ansolabehere’s post on “The Brown Majority,” featuring some worrisome statistics for GOP partisans, including: “Over the coming decade, aging alone will increase the number of Hispanics who are eligible to vote by 25 percent.”
Republicans, don’t read this. Keep blithering about the virtues of “creative destruction” and other elitist concepts from Austrian economists and/or Ayn Rand. Voters love to be patronized with cold, academic jargon. And Mitt, keep telling voters more about what a regular guy you are, being unemployed and stuff. Maybe get a beat-up pick-up truck and a NASCAR hat. Oh, and please talk more about Bain’s wonderful track record.
Get up to speed on the latest political buzz-terms at Katy Steinmetz’s Time Swampland post.
Huntsman’s website erasing in context of his Romney endorsement is a hoot. The Fixx’s Rachel Weiner explains: “In October, Huntsman called Romney a “perfectly lubricated weather vane on the important issues of the day,” who “has been missing in action in terms of showing any kind of leadership….”There’s a question whether he’s running for the White House or the Waffle House,” Huntsman said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in November…He told ABC News around the same time that “the American people, the voters, are going to have a hard time finding, I think, a gut level trust when it comes to someone who has been on so many sides of major issues.”
Regardless of who wins the presidential election, the outcome of four key Senate races in Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, and Virginia will likely be pivotal in securing majority control. Charlie Cook has a savvy update in his National Journal column, “Epic Battles’ Will Seal Senate’s Fate.”
Check out this GOP candidates Rushmore caricature, made, appropriately, of sand.

Today being the MLK holiday, we can be sure that some of the Republican presidential candidates will have nice things to say about Dr. King, and they will trot out the old “content of their character” MLK quote to suggest he was a conservative.
Although King did not formally endorse any presidential candidates, he came very close on occasion, and it’s instructive to recall some of his thoughts on Republican presidents and candidates during his lifetime. On Eisenhower:

In September 1957 I thought it was quite regrettable and unfortunate that young high school students in Little Rock, Arkansas, had to go to school under the protection of federal troops. But I thought it was even more unfortunate that Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, through irresponsible actions, left the president of the United States with no other alternative. I believe firmly in nonviolence, but, at the same time, I am not an anarchist. I believe in the intelligent use of police force. And I thought that was all we had in Little Rock. It wasn’t an army fighting against a nation or a race of people. It was just police force, seeking to enforce the law of the land. It was high time that a man as popular in the world as Eisenhower-a man with his moral influence-speak out and take a stand against what was happening all over the South. So I backed the President, and I sent him a telegram commending him for the positive and forthright stand that he took in the Little Rock school situation. He showed the nation and the world that the United States was a nation dedicated to law and order rather than mob rule.
Nevertheless, it was strange to me that the federal government was more concerned about what happened in Budapest than what happened in Birmingham. I thought Eisenhower believed that integration would be a fine thing. But I thought he felt that the more you push it, the more tension it would create, so, just wait a few more years and it will work itself out. I didn’t think that Eisenhower felt like being a crusader for integration. President Eisenhower was a man of integrity and goodwill, but I am afraid that on the question of integration he didn’t understand the dimensions of social change involved nor how the problem was to be worked out.

On Goldwater:

The Republican Party geared its appeal and program to racism, reaction, and extremism. All people of goodwill viewed with alarm and concern the frenzied wedding at the Cow Palace of the KKK with the radical right. The “best man” at this ceremony was a senator whose voting record, philosophy, and program were anathema to all the hard-won achievements of the past decade.
It was both unfortunate and disastrous that the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater as its candidate for President of the United States. In foreign policy Mr. Goldwater advocated a narrow nationalism, a crippling isolationism, and a trigger-happy attitude that could plunge the whole world into the dark abyss of annihilation. On social and economic issues, Mr. Goldwater represented an unrealistic conservatism that was totally out of touch with the realities of the twentieth century. The issue of poverty compelled the attention of all citizens of our country. Senator Goldwater had neither the concern nor the comprehension necessary to grapple with this problem of poverty in the fashion that the historical moment dictated. On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represented a philosophy that was morally indefensible and socially suicidal. While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.
While I had followed a policy of not endorsing political candidates, I felt that the prospect of Senator Goldwater being President of the United States so threatened the health, morality, and survival of our nation, that I could not in good conscience fail to take a stand against what he represented.

On Reagan:

…When a Hollywood performer, lacking distinction even as an actor can become a leading war hawk candidate for the Presidency, only the irrationalities induced by a war psychosis can explain such a melancholy turn of events.

King was more ambivalent about Nixon, who had called King “frequently about things.” King said of Nixon that “it is quite possible that he has no racial prejudice,” and “is absolutely sincere on this issue,” but also that he also considered Nixon a “moral coward” for not taking a strong moral stand on civil rights at a time when it would have helped a lot. (from chapter 15 of “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.”)
None of this is to say that there were no progressive Republicans who supported the African American freedom struggle –there were some like Senator Jacob Javitz and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. Interestingly, Republicans including Sen. Goldwater, William Buckley, Sen. Strom Thurmond and President Reagan supported the King holiday bill, despite their stated opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Rep. Jack Kemp was instrumental in passing the MLK holiday legislation. There are many rank and file Republicans who admire and celebrate Dr. King today.
In a transparent attempt to back away from his repulsive newsletter, Rep. Ron Paul has recently lauded what he sees as King’s libertarian creds. But Paul opposed both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the MLK holiday.
And yes, there were plenty of racist Democrats during King’s lifetime. It would be fair to say that racial prejudice was a defining characteristic of too many Dixiecrats.
King never gave up hope that both parties would take a strong stand against racial discrimination, and he testified to the platform committees of both major parties. But the record clearly shows which political party today is the more vigorous champion of the cause of racial and economic justice championed by Martin Luther King, Jr.