Some of which voted for Obama in 2008 and 2102, taking a pragmatic "no way I want to see HIM in the Oval Office" attitude.
I have one Republican friend who is admittedly a total nut case. He almost single-handedly helped finance direct-mail fundraising to get Reagan elected, and has gone farther and farther to the right ever since. He's smart, articulate (though not Buckley kind of articulate), and I only stumped him once. That was when he was spouting the tired line about Obama being a socialist, and I reminded him that Obama took a bankrupt General Motors into Government hands, nursed it back to profitability, and the returned it to the private sector--something the very opposite of what a socialist would do. That shut him up. But most of the time, he's off the deep end. Knows his stuff, though. He told me in December 2011 that Santorum would surprise everyone in the Iowa caucus in 2012. He was right about that and almost no one else was. At the end of the Cheney administration, he hated Bush Lite almost as much as I did, but for NOT doing what he was expected to do, instead of for all the damage he DID do.
I once helped put on a show in DC about ten years ago, a real savage satire of the Cheneybush administration. The only Republican to show up? My crazy but gentlemanly friend Richard. Recognized by a few attendees, he was asked WTF he was doing there? He said first of all, it was always useful to know how the opposition was ticking (and I was definitely the opposition), plus I was a friend.
Hey, if Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan can meet for after hours cocktails in the White House, then I can still be friends with Richard Viguerie. I think he's completely batshit crazy politically, and he thinks the same of me. But he never has an evil word for me personally, and never loses his genuinely friendly demeanor toward me and my family--something I can't say about some who I should consider to be my political allies on this very board.
Having said all that, MOST Republicans I meet, I can't STAND! 
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