The survey found the most dramatic drops in party affiliation, perhaps unsurprisingly, among college students (10 percentage points) and those who seldom or never attend church (nine percentage points). However, the GOP has also suffered a nine-point loss in the Midwest, traditionally a party stronghold.

This graph puts the near-term problems facing the Republican Party into perspective:

With the electorate continuing to trend away from the party after two consecutive drubbings at the polls — and with party leaders seemingly unconcerned about the defection of 30-year Senate veteran Arlen Specter to the Democrats — the GOP’s conservative base appears to be cocooning into itself and running away with the party. The question that remains to be answered is how this strategy can result in a Republican Party that is electorally viable on a national level.

From Bloomberg:

The pledges, made orally or in writing, are viewed by advocates as buttressing federally funded education programs that say avoiding pre-marital sex rather than using protection will curb pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. President George W. Bush’s administration more than doubled the budget for abstinence-only education programs since 1999 to $204 million this fiscal year. More than a dozen states have rejected federal money rather than limit what is taught.

“The results suggest that the virginity pledge does not change sexual behavior,” wrote author Janet Rosenbaum, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of population, family and reproductive health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “Clinicians should provide birth control information to all adolescents, especially abstinence-only sex education participants.”

A 2007 congressional study (PDF) found that abstinence-only programs have “no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence,” and students who participate in them become sexually active at the same age and have as many partners as students who participate in more comprehensive sex-ed programs. With Democrats set to control the presidency and both houses of Congress, these studies should spell the end for abstinence-only education.

Ironically, that could be good news for conservatives who are honest about their desire to decrease the number of abortions and curb the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases.

Senate Republicans are following this course for three key reasons — first is payback against a major industrial union; second is payback against states like Michigan and Ohio who have been moving away from the GOP; third is the desire to advantage Japanese auto manufacturers who disproportionately do business in their southern states.

I think the first and second points are key — that the GOP is taking a firm stand against the United Auto Workers, a core Democratic constituency, and in turn, against big-time GM states like Michigan and Ohio.

In recent history, Michigan and Ohio have been reliable swing states. But the actions of prominent Republicans may call into question whether they will retain their status as battleground states in future competitive elections.

As President Lyndon Johnson famously and presciently mused about the impact his signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would have on his own Democratic Party, “There goes the South for a generation.”

I suspect some forward-thinking Republicans might harbor similar concerns about Michigan and Ohio.

Anyway, in a segment on Friday, a caller raised big questions about how Republicans can possibly seize the change mantle, if that means they’d have to clean up their own mess; while another suggested that the public is partly complicit in supporting a failing press.

Below are excerpts for interested readers:

Michael (Carmel Valley): Thank you, Peter. Hello, Ari. I just wanna make a couple quick comments about the Palin-McCain ticket, which I think, in some ways that’s what it’s become….one of the most important comments made during this campaign has gone almost under the radar, and it happens to be Jon Stewart interviewing Mike Huckabee—do you remember this one, where he [suggested] to Mike Huckabee that his position is basically, quote, “Our party is the only party that can clean up the mess made by our party.” And I think that’s the sort of thing we have got to get our arms around.

Ari: I think Michael’s right. I think that is the narrative that the Republicans settled on. But we should be careful here, in this sort of season of discontent, to understand that just as Democrats dislike it when politicians in the party move to the right — out of the perception that they can get votes that way, right or wrong — that worries the left.

Well, there is something positive for Barack Obama here, that after months of “Experience,” [and] “Ready to Lead” and “Country First” from the McCain campaign, they have settled here, in their final hours, on his message of “Change.” Now it’s working — that they’re co-opting part of it — and that Sarah Palin brought, as The New York Times put it, the “stamp of history to the ticket.” That’s not an insignificant thing — apart from ideology and apart from the lies we were discussing earlier.

But it also represents Democrats, for once, defining what is politically palpable and nationally desirable, and the trick for Obama is not to let it be co-opted. But they’re running on change because Obama made change universally desired in this electorate. That is something worth remembering…. they [now] value change over experience in their own politicking.

Pat (Humboldt): Hi Peter B. and Ari. The media will keep lying to us as long as we keep paying them to lie to us. As long as we subscribe to cable, as long as we subscribe to newspapers, they will keep lying to us…

Peter: Well, they’re trying to distract their way to the finish line, and some of it is working, right, Ari?

Ari: Yeah, I think distracting works. I think you’re right that there’s a market here, and if you can get away with it, it’s supported. There are changes–I was on Rachel Maddow’s radio show tonight before this. I think she’s great and I think she’s doing well with a marketable, successful show on television now. And then obviously, I’ll say it out of self-interest but not with any ambivalence, the places that I write for—The Nation, reader-supported since 1865 and not corporate; The Washington Independent, a different model but a non-profit, which allows us to do different things than corporate media. And you can go to those sites and support them any way you can. We appreciate it—it helps.

Today Obama heads to Flint, Mich., for an economic discussion at the regional technology center of a local community college.

Obama at a Chrystler plant on previous MI visit.

As Michael Moore documented almost 20 years ago, Flint is the kind of town that gets sold out by CEOs and neglected by politicians. The major job losses hit decades ago, but Flint’s population is still in free fall — it recently dropped 8 percent, to 114,000 people. Over the past three decades, the deciannual census counts show the population steadily dropped more than 10 percent.

Even as it thins out, this blue-collar base is essential to keeping Michigan blue. In 2004, Sen. John Kerry ran up his numbers to 60 percent in Genesse County, anchored by Flint, and eked by statewide at 51 percent. According to one report, Flint’s voters were rated the 10th most reliably liberal in the country — just behind San Francisco.

But Obama’s Michigan message is not all job losses and mortgage nightmares. The campaign will tap a local worker-turned-student, Jon Terbush, to kick off today’s event. Terbush, using money from a buyout after 12 years with American Axle, now is attending community college to brush up on technology and auto repair, according to a backgrounder from the campaign. Such voters have few reasons to re-up on Republican economics, as The New York Times explained today:

[T]he principal elements of Mr. McCain’s economic agenda on taxes, trade, regulation and health care follow the philosophic outlines of a deeply unpopular Bush administration. In offering new, immediate economic benefits, Mr. Obama has far outbid his Republican adversary… [Obama] has offered an ambitious range of proposals to arrest that decline and help average workers compete in a global economy.

Those proposals include a new tax credit of $500 per worker, or $1,000 for two-worker households; a new mortgage-interest credit, valued at an average of $500, for homeowners who do not itemize their tax deductions, and a college tuition subsidy of $4,000 per year for students who agree to perform community service. Mr. Obama would wipe out income taxes for older Americans earning $50,000 or less, saving some 7 million households an average of $1,400 apiece.

That’s on top of the still-unspecified subsidies Mr. Obama would provide for the purchase of health insurance for those who don’t now have it, the elimination of capital-gains taxes for small start-up businesses and an increase in the existing dependent-care tax credit that could save $1,100 for a single parent of two children who earns $40,000…

The Times reports that McCain, in contrast, is putting far less on the kitchen table:

By comparison, Mr. McCain’s list of proposals on this front is far more modest. He would double the existing child exemption to $7,000 from $3,500, but most tax-filers would not benefit because they have no dependent children or have incomes so modest that they already do not owe income taxes. Mr. McCain, of Arizona, would also offer a summer gas-tax holiday valued at about $30 a month.

Here on Obama’s plane, which is about to make the 40-minute hop from Chicago to Michigan, there’s little economic talk. Early this morning, Obama donned a White Sox cap and dropped off his daughters at their first day of school, then squeezed in a gym visit before boarding “O Force One.”

The schdeule promises a long day, with two events in Michigan and then a trip to Ohio — where Obama will continue to press for blue-collar support.

In a stirring essay that ran in The Washington Post on Monday and also on his blog, Wolfson narrates his feelings as a “Clintonite in Denver“:

….Then came Thursday night at Invesco Field. During the campaign, we scoffed at events like this, mostly because we were not capable of producing them. A cross-section of voters waited for hours to enter the stadium and take their seats. As one friend put it, it looked more like an American convention than the convention of any particular political party. Clinton delegates greeted one another with tears and hugs and were greeted in turn by Obama delegates. Several Obama supporters took my hand to thank me for what the Clintons had said that week, urging that they stay involved in the campaign. Every so often, I would simply look around me, amazed at the significance not just of the day but of the entire campaign.

Wolfson describes the embraces and excitement of a party uniting behind Obama:

No one in recent history had attempted this kind of a political conversation with 75,000 people. Barack Obama pulled it off. For 18 months, I listened to Obama on television, sometimes intently, often just barely — background noise to a running series of conference calls and meetings and emails. In person, my attention undivided, I saw something of what so many others had seen for so long. Progress in America is never cheap, and even today history exacts a price for Obama’s victory — the dreams of electing the first female president, the dreams of so many who rushed toward Hillary Clinton on rope lines across America and refused to give up her hand and their hopes. Today these dreams are giving way to another kind of progress….

On Wolfson’s blog, a woman named Donna, who said she was an Obama delegate from North Carolina, wrote that the essay was moving, and told Wolfson, “I have tremendous respect for both Clintons and believe that you ran a campaign you should be proud of.” Another commenter called the essay “beautiful,” and one Clinton supporter said it elicited a first-time response to a newspaper article:

This is the first time I have ever responded to a newspaper article, but wanted you to know that I admire and applaud you for your article in “The Washington Post” today. I voted for Clinton in the Florida primary but am now supporting Obama 100 percent.

Back in Denver, Wolfson and I also discussed the job he did take after Clinton bowed out — a regular commentator for Fox News. I mentioned that the GOP sends out press releases promoting comments from Democrats that might undermine Obama, often from Fox broadcasts. For example, for two days leading up to the convention, the Republican National Comittee press releases highlighted comments from another Clintonite-turned-Fox commentator, Lanny Davis.

Wolfson agreed that a fair way to test his commentary is to see if it provides fodder for Republicans. So far, I count several RNC emails about Davis, but none about Wolfson.