Caravan Ray wrote: And the idea that approximately half of a very well educated nation may consider being represented by some christian fundamentalist freaks who think global warming is some sort of euro-conspiracy is approaching burning giraffe territory.
The number is pretty skewed, though. Single-party primaries only turn out
half of the voters in the country at best, and even then, less than half of
those want the crazy conspiracy-theory fundamentalist in office. If even half of those voters agreed, this contest would have been over by now.
So in actuality, fewer than half of the nation are registered Republicans, and fewer than half of the registered republicans turn out to vote in the Primary, and then fewer than half of
those are actually voting for Santorum. So think of it like this. 100% of the population is here. Only about 30% are registered Republicans, and those 30% are the only ones who get to vote in the primary. Of those, something in the neighborhood of half will not show up to the polls. So now we're talking about approximate 15% of the total population. And of those 15%, only about a quarter support Rick Santorum as their primary candidate. So he's only got maybe 4% of the general population behind him.
The scary thing is this: He's managed to convince the nation that that 4% is a national mandate for Dark Ages policy based on religious doctrine. And if he maintains his lead, everyone else will drop out of the race except for Obama (and a few other candidates who won't get any significant number of votes anyway - including
Roseanne Barr), and then Rick Santorum will probably attain somewhere between 45% and 53% of the general election vote share, just because of the (R) next to his name. Now
that's surreal.