Rob Rogers for May 22, 2014

For at least the last 40-50 years, the Republican party has relied on the Right Wing Religious types to be the energy of their party. The party consisted of them and some Rich Guys who used them to do the work in their campaign offices and run their propaganda machines. (There were ordinary people who voted Republican, but they didn’t run the party).The Rich Guys accomplished this by telling the RWR types that they agreed with them on the issues that mattered to them— birth control, civil rights, abortion, conspicuous exercise of Christian activities ( Christmas displays, public prayer, etc). However, once they got elected, they forgot about those things until the next time they needed the RWR to show up and run the campaign offices, since their actual agenda was to improve conditions for Rich Guys. It took a generation or two, but eventually, the RWRs figured out that they were getting shafted on a regular basis and decided to take over the party and run RWRs instead of the Rich Guys. The Rich Guys responded by forming superpacs and trying to put enough money into the elections to buy them. That worked for a while, but then the RWRs wised up and formed the Tea Party, which made enough noise to get the Rich Guys candidates to have to actually look like they were trying to do some of the stuff they had been promising for the last 50 years. They have actually accomplished pretty much none of it on a national level- the Supreme Court is the only body that has given the Republicans any relevant victories- but they had to step up their game from just saying they would do something and start just losing every attempt.Problem for both sides is that the RWRs don’t have enough people to win a national election. The Tea Party has a negative rating of around 65%. And, the RGs don’t have enough money to buy enough votes to win an election without them. There is no point in broadcasting an ad 50 times if the majority of voters didn’t believe it the first time they heard it. So, much as they might not get along, have entirely different agendas, and a history that both sides try to ignore, they have no chance of surviving at all without each other. Consequently, the Republican party will try to patch up their differences and present a united platform, the contents of which is despised by both sides. And, no one voting Republican will be happy with the cobbled together agenda their candidate professes, but they simply have no other choice.