What Are They Thinking?

Here is "The 2010 Comprehensive Daily Kos/Research 2000 Poll of Self-Identified Republicans," for your horrified rubber-necking pleasure.

You may want to start with DougJ's introductory observations: "Is the Taliban this crazy?"

CJ adds another pointed one:

73% think gay people should not be allowed to teach in public schools. This position puts the GOP base well to the right of none other than Ronald Reagan, who helped defeat the Briggs Initiative, a 1978 referendum in California that would have forbidden gays or people who advocated gay rights from teaching in public schools.

He's right (para. 4).

So, unhappy lefties: consider the alternative, is one of my points.

__________

BTW, the healthily skeptical among you may be saying, "Kos paid for the poll, yeah, right." Here's what I said in response to that question elsewhere:

... just for the record:

Methodology

DKOS REPUBLICAN POLL 2010

The Daily Kos Republican Poll was conducted by Research 2000 from January 20 through January 31, 2010. A total of 2003 self identified Republicans were interviewed nationally by telephone. Those interviewed were selected by the random variation of the last four digits of telephone numbers, nationally.

The margin for error, according to standards customarily used by statisticians, is no more than plus or minus 2% percentage points. This means that there is a 95 percent probability that the "true" figure would fall within that range if the entire self identified Republican population were sampled. The margin for error is higher for any demographic subgroup, such as for gender or region.

Now, I'm going to take that with a grain of salt, because I'm not convinced Research 2000's sampling methods are perfect, because of their record as I remember it from 2008. I think of them as about as good as Rasmussen*(-1), which means a slight house effect, as Nate Silver calls it, should probably be assumed.

Still, having said that, and even hypothesizing that some of those sampled told the pollsters whatever they thought would "most annoy liberals" rather than what they actually believed, the numbers are still pretty shocking; i.e., subtract 10 or 20 points from the crazy answer to just about any of the questions, and you've still got bad craziness.

(x-posted)