Legitimate question here, and I don't mean to be snarky so please don't take it that way.
Do any of you have republican friends?
Not really. Ed barely counts nowadays. I have... probably 5 really major circles of friends, 1 that's offline, 2 that are online and 2 that are hybrids (you guys are one of the hybrids) and in all of them I'm pretty much free to trash republicans and their policies openly. I didn't really know with one of my groups until recently where we started opening up about politics and it turned out that yes, all of us were your standard liberal types.
I don't know where I'd meet republican friends. Honestly, and I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but being a republican in 2018 would represent such a stark divide in personal beliefs and philosophy that I don't think it would be possible to remain friends with someone who identified strongly as a republican even if I wanted to. I don't think it would be very likely that we would ever have anything in common. And although my friends groups are all completely unrelated to politics, everyone's just... liberal as a baseline. Political differences exist, but none that would lead someone to identify as republican or any sort of right-wing. I live in a pretty blue city and associate in circles that draw blue people, for whatever reason that may be.
It actually makes it really hard to understand where republican ideas even come from, because literally everyone in my life is not a part of that group, aside from those that occasionally show up in the periphery of my vision here. Progressive ideals are just completely bog-standard in every facet of my life, they make sense to everyone and while the exact implementation of them differs nobody really disagrees on baseline things like "the environment needs to be protected" or "LGBT people are cool" or "we really need to do stuff to help poor and disadvantaged people." The fact that 100% of the people in my life are like this makes it very difficult to live in a country run by people who are NOT like this, and equally as confusing.
Most people don't act like different human beings based on their politics. If you base your life around politics, you likely are in too deep. Politics is just your opinions regarding government and society. It doesn't make you not another human being. There are great people and terrible people no matter what your politics are. ---