Poll: 52% Say No One Speaks for the Republicans

It keeps getting worse for the Republicans. This USA Today/Gallup poll shows how bad it really is:

Republicans, out of power and divided over how to get it back, are finding even the most basic questions hard to answer.

Here's one: Who speaks for the GOP?

The question flummoxes most Americans, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, which is among the reasons for the party's sagging state and uncertain direction.

A 52% majority of those surveyed couldn't come up with a name when asked to specify "the main person" who speaks for Republicans today. Of those who could, the top response was radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh (13%), followed in order by former vice president Dick Cheney, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former House speaker Newt Gingrich. Former president George W. Bush ranked fifth, at 3%.

So the dominant faces of the Republican Party are all men, all white, all conservative and all old enough to join AARP, ranging in age from 58 (Limbaugh) to 72 (McCain). They include some of the country's most strident voices on issues from Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court to President Obama's policies at home and abroad. Two are retired from politics, and one has never been a candidate.

This comes in the wake other polls showing a party in decline:

A new Gallup analysis shows that the precipitous decline in the number of people who identify themselves as Republicans is widespread across nearly every demographic group -- a development that suggests that there is no simple solution to solving the party's current problems.

As we have written about before, the number of self-identifying Republicans stood at 21 percent last month -- the lowest it has been since the fall of 1983.

This tendency for people to disassociate themselves with the Republican Party is echoed in Gallup's data. Combining several months of surveys -- with a large sample of more than 7,000 adults -- shows that over the last eight years self-identifying Republicans have gone from 44 percent to 39 percent while self-identifying Democrats have risen from 45 percent to 53 percent. (These numbers push independents who lean in one direction or the other into the party toward which they lean.)

It's a white male party. This Gallup poll is from 6/1:

More than 6 in 10 Republicans today are white conservatives, while most of the rest are whites with other ideological leanings; only 11% of Republicans are Hispanics, or are blacks or members of other races. By contrast, only 12% of Democrats are white conservatives, while about half are white moderates or liberals and a third are nonwhite.