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[Tyrone Slothrop]

• Here are some of the highlights from GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio's mammoth survey of Republicans.
  
  ...the party’s social/cultural wing remains about the same size, while the economic wing has “shrunk by nearly two thirds.” Replacing those Republicans have been national security and defense voters. Free marketeers, per Fabrizio, comprise about 8 percent of the GOP electorate. They’re skeptical of government action, largely male, baby-boomerish, less frequent church-goers, and they’re not moralists. Fabrizio believes that these voters comprise Fred Thompson’s strongest voting block.
  
  Then there are the Bush hawks – 20 percent of the Republican party, again, mostly males, they love Bush, they believe in the quest to spread democracy overseas, and many are new to the GOP.
  
  The opposite, in some ways, of the Bush hawks are what Fabrizio’s taxonomy calls the “Fortress America” crowd, or what we used to refer to as the Buchanan Brigades. 8 percent of the party, they’re protectionist, anti-illegal immigration, and want to end the war in Iraq. They ain’t Bushies. Fabrizio says that nearly 50% of these voters hail from the south.
  
  Then there’s one of John McCain’s strongest groups – the “Gov Knows Best GOPers”. They’re focused on “social” issues (as opposed to “cultural” issues). They’re lifelong GOPers and believe that government can and should intervene to solve social and environmental problems. They tend to have a libertarian streak and many aren’t comfortable with sky-high defense spending. [Do these two sentences not make any sense next to each other? -- T.S.] This group is disproportionately female and coastal in geography.
  
  The moralists are the largest chunk of the party – 24% in Fabrizio’s reckoning. In many ways, the media uses this group as a synecdoche for the entire GOP base. The moralists are strongly partisan, they’re very conservative, they have a lower average income than the rest of the party, mostly female and have the highest share of homemakers.

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