"'It sounds like both parties are trying to convince their base that if they vote for the other side, it will be the zombie apocalypse ...'" IMO if the Republicans are voted in, it *will* be a zombie apocalypse.

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COMMENTS: 
*  The GOtP certainly has changed my outlook on them! It has gone from bad to worse! The hilarity of the riders in their Clown Car would be scary if any of them really stood any of winning a National Election. Only 20% of the Voters call themselves Republican, and Trump has 18% of them. Whoop! Whoop!
*  Seems to me that conservative politics has much more than a perception problem. They have a reality problem. Better spin does not change the fact that conservatives see government as an obstruction to free enterprise that champions the rights of rich rule-makers to exploit all resources (including people) in order to generate some free-market utopia that makes everybody happy. Didn't work when kings ruled the serfs, and didn't happen when Reagan rolled back the taxes on the rich. We need government to keep the playing fields level. Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated how destructive their policies are in actual practice, and the populace is wising up. Better PR is not the answer.
*  so negative campaigns win. say enough bad things and people too busy putting food on the table don't make the time to vote. it's as simple as that. as bad as the supreme court was in allowing corporations to spend as much as they want on elections, not having a law against saying bad things is worse. my mom use to always tell me, "if you can't say something nice, don't bother saying anything at all" (it was a close second to "eat your carrots!!!").
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Changing the perceptions of conservative politics
By Julian Burrell, July 17, 2015

The American Enterprise Institute is right at the top of the lists of influential conservative think tanks. In his new book, “The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America,” Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, has a lot of thoughts about modern conservative politics and how it can shed the stereotypes people usually have about right-wing politics.

“I’ve talked to a political conservatives, and their opening bid tends to be ‘Hey, conservative politics might not be so great for the poor, but it makes the whole country more rich and that will just lift everybody up,’ as if this were about money,” Brooks says. “It isn’t about money. It’s about dignity. It’s about freedom. It’s about work and all the things we really care about.”

Brooks thinks that the people damaging this are people and movements that perpetuate the idea that conservatives are not compassionate — namely,Donald Trump and the tea party. Brooks says, “The tea party is in the process of trying to transition from a protest movement to a social movement. And that’s going to require not just fighting against things but fighting for people.”

Brooks is less optimistic about candidate Donald Trump’s ability to bring good to the party. “Donald Trump is phenomenom of an election campaign that has a whole lot of media, people that want to build up what’s effectively a political side show into something else,” he says. “There’s nothing that I regret more than somebody calling himself a Republican who is effectively anti-immigrant. I think it’s destructive.”

Despite the stereotypes conservatives face, Brooks does not see this issue of politics exclusive to the perception of the right.

“It looks like it could be another election that’s about competing pessimism," he says. "It sounds like both parties are trying to convince their base that if they vote for the other side, it will be the zombie apocalypse,” he says. Brooks believes that there needs to be a greater change in the dialogue between the two parties. “I want conservatives — and liberals too, by the way — is to be more optimistic and compete with each other on the basis of optimism.”
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