Some conservatives are openly advocating a purified and smaller Republican party as the Gazette reports:
At an Independence Institute banquet Nov. 13, syndicated conservative columnist and Colorado resident Michelle Malkin addressed the fact Republicans are divided over faith-based politics, such as the need to ban abortion. She encouraged conservatives to maintain their positions on social issues despite pressures to back down. She said conservatives could work through immigration disagreements.
And what of economics-only libertarians, who largely despise the party's opposition to gay marriage, abortion and fetal stem cell research? Malkin said "let them go their own way."
Over the last decade, the 180,000 voter registration advantage owned by the Republicans in Colorado has completely evaporated. If Michelle Malkin were talking about letting twenty, or even 200 people "go their own way," what she said might be justifiable. But 200,000 is political suicide as recent results demonstrate.
Amendment 48 was such an overreaching amendment that few who thought it through could vote for it unless impelled by deep religious beliefs.
One unintended outcome of putting Amendment 48 on the ballot was that the results quantified the core support level for social conservatism in Colorado at 27% of the electorate. It may be lower if the Amendment propelled social conservatives to the polls, but it cannot be higher.
If one assumes that a substantial majority of those voters are in the Republican party, and that the Republican Party has about 33% of registrations, then about 80% of the current party consists of social conservatives. The word "current" was chosen carefully because so many former Republicans have obviously already "gone their own way.
That 80% tracks closely with the percentage of Republicans who voted for Bob Schaffer.
In short, the Amendment 48 results suggest that a pure social conservative party starts out with 27% of the vote in Colorado. It can climb no higher unless it is willing to accept fiscal conservatives as equals.
For reasons that are completely incomprehensible, the social conservative faction of the party seems to be completely unable to grasp that concept. If it could, their favored spokespersons wouldn't be saying "let them go their own way."
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