The Real America

[Geee]

American Thinker:

I have been writing for a long time about the real news in the Battleground Poll results over the last decade. These bipartisan polls predict election results with remarkable accuracy and which also reveal the answers to all the questions respondents provided -- including, critically, how people describe themselves ideologically.

In the last twenty consecutive Battleground Poll reports over the last ten years, the overwhelming majority of Americans have described themselves as "very conservative" or "somewhat conservative," although the poll provides six other possible responses: "moderate," "somewhat liberal," "very liberal," or "don't know/unsure." On average, about 60% of Americans in the Battleground Poll call themselves conservative.

I have also noted that in the Gallup Poll, one of the oldest and most respected (although hardly a friend to conservatives), when respondents in each of the fifty states are asked to define themselves ideologically, conservatives overwhelmingly outnumber liberals. In August 2009, Gallup released the first of these polls, conducted in July 2009. The results were stunning: in every one of the fifty states, more people called themselves "conservative" than "liberal" -- even in Vermont, even in Massachusetts, even in Hawaii.

It looks as though Gallup, although honestly presenting the data, wanted to downplay the significance. The title of that Gallup release was "Political Ideology: Conservative Label Prevails in South," with the flatly erroneous subtitle "Conservatives outnumber liberals in nearly every state, but not in D.C." The District of Columbia, of course, is not a state. Conservatives, according to that poll, did outnumber liberals in every state.

A few months later, in February 2010, Gallup announced "Ideology: Three Deep South States Are Most Conservative." The results, as six months earlier, showed that every single state had more conservatives than liberals. This time, interestingly, Gallup did not round the percentages off, but instead gave data to the tenth of one percent (e.g., Vermont had 28.8% conservatives and 28.0% liberals). In August 2010, Gallup gave the same state-by-state breakdown, and only in Rhode Island were there more liberals than conservatives.