Politics isn’t about who you love. It’s about who you despise. That’s the upshot of a paper by Emory University political scientists Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz and Emory political science graduate student Stephen Webster.

“The most important influence on the 2016 presidential election as well as the House and Senate elections will be the division of the American electorate into two warring partisan camps,” Abramowitz and Webster write in “The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is the Other Party,” posted June 4 on the Center for Politics’ Crystal Ball site.

Abramowitz and Webster found that for a growing percentage of American voters, negative feelings toward the opposing party outweigh positive feelings toward their own party. They note that most of this change has occurred between 2000 and 2012, when the percentage of positive partisans — voters who liked their own party more than they disliked the opposing party — fell from 61% to 38%, while the proportion of negative partisans — voters who disliked the opposing party more than they liked their own party — rose from 20% to 42%.

Well, count me among that group as well. I definitely loathe and fear the current crop of Republicans than love the Democratic party.

My party has, for a long time, been the party without balls. Bernie Sanders has balls and outrage, but really isn’t electable. Hillary Clinton has balls and tons of experience, but is basically a member of the liberal corporatocracy. She would keep the ship heading in the same direction as Obama, which is generally in the right direction, or more likely, the best we can do right now.

But the Democratic House? No balls there.
And the Democratic Senate? No balls there either.
The Democratic Party in general? No balls, with few exceptions.

As for Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina? They have balls aplenty, but no hearts. Truly, I loathe these assholes. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and John Kasich are a little bit better, mostly by not actually being assholes. But the whole Republican party platform is just about what they don’t want. There is nothing in there that would actually make the lives of ordinary people better, so far as I can see.