I’m not the first to observe that the Republicans seem to be moving into a smaller and smaller political neighborhood. Connecting less and less frequently with the center, but still going on and on about silly stuff, still offering little or nothing to make America a better place, they seem to be aiming at irrelevance.

GOP Losses Span Nearly All Demographic Groups

The decline and fall of the Republican Party in recent years has been so widespread that the party has lost support among nearly every major demographic subgroup of likely voters across the country, according to a new Gallup poll.

The party lost support among a broad swath of Americans, from conservative to liberal, low-income to high-income, married to unmarried, and elderly to young.

The only subgroup in which the party saw a slight increase in support from 2001 to 2009 was frequent churchgoers.

I will be foolish enough to hazard a guess as to why it continues unabated: because having a lock on radio and a giant television channel feels like having power. They’re so often on the air, they look so professional getting their talking points out, they’re so wildly popular on American radio–they must be making a killing in the political game, right? Hell, everywhere they go, audiences immediately agree with them, and then they’re cheered off stage. Everything’s swell. Other than the party being almost completely impotent and having a dismal future, other than that, sure.

As a result, there is a huge disconnect between the arrogant ‘reality’ that comes out of radio and Fox and the actual reality of what’s going on in politics, and it is mind-bending.

Take for instance, the just-started ‘debate’ on Obama’s new SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor. The Right-Wing Communicators are absolutely of one mind on her: she’s a racist, she’s an atrocious candidate, and they are absolutely furious that she would even be considered. There’s no ‘debate’ there, that’s for sure; Sotomayor appears to be one of the worst Americans on the planet, and perhaps in history.

And who is saying this? The giants of giant media. Rush Limbaugh is the biggest, most powerful American radio personality in history: inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame back in 1993, he reaches something like 15 to 30 million listeners every week. Fox television is the second most watched network, their News Channel is the #1 rated cable news outlet. And good old ABC and NBC have their Conservative mouths too, and they’re just as strident. And here they all go:

All of these experts, personalities, discussers, elders, veterans of politics, reaching millions and millions of Americans, all so monolithically furious about this woman, this disgusting racist. What’s the net result?

Sotomayor’s expected to sail right through.

These people are insane, yeah, I know, but there’s something more here worth looking at. How is it that there’s this whopping disconnect now between the ‘propaganda media’ and politics? They just haven’t lost that many viewers or listeners over the last five years (in fact, I think Fox News viewership is actually up this year) to explain why only 23% of people now call themselves ‘Republican’.

So the only other thing to conclude is this: people aren’t as easily swayed as they once were. The angry titans are throwing media punches, but they’re not landing.

[next: theories on the 'disconnect']