Nate Silver, the man behind the excellent political statistics blog FiveThirtyEight, explains through new data, why the Republican Party is opposed to any compromise on the debt ceiling, the budget and new taxes.

Under the headline, “Why the Republicans Resist Compromise,” he writes that the reason is that the Republican Party today is more dependent on those who call themselves conservative than any time since 1984. Fully 67 percent of those who voted for the Republican candidates for the House of Representatives last year called themselves conservative, compared with 58 percent two years earlier and 48 percent a decade ago.

“The terms ‘Republican’ and ‘conservative’ are growing closer and closer to being synonyms; fewer and fewer non-conservatives vote Republican, and fewer and fewer Republican voters are not conservative.”