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There Are More Liberals, But Not Fewer Conservatives
FiveThirtyEight:A few days ago, a potentially troubling report for Republicans came out: Fewer Americans were identifying as “conservative” than at any point in the past five years. According to polling conducted this year by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, just 33 percent of voters called themselves conservative. That’s down from 37 percent last year and 39 percent in 2010. Given that this is usually a fairly stable measure, Republican pollster Bill McInturff was worried.
If the NBC News/Wall Street Journal numbers are right, he should be. Ideology has been increasingly linked to party identification, which, in turn, has been increasingly tied to voting patterns. Were there to be fewer conservatives, Republicans would have a harder time winning elections.
Still, I’m not ready to declare this a trend; data from the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey may be an outlier. Every month or two, the foundation sponsors a survey that asks Americans about the health-care system. At the end of these surveys, people are asked whether they identify as liberal, conservative or moderate. To my knowledge, the Kaiser poll is the only survey besides the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll to regularly ask and release data about ideological self-identification. I have averaged all the Kaiser foundation surveys in each year going back to 2007. For 2015, there are more than 4,500 respondents.
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...snip...
The Kaiser poll does show that more people identified as liberal this year than in any other year since 2007. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found the same thing. In the Kaiser data, this seems to continue a trend from 2014, which also found a higher percentage of liberals than in previous years.
If the NBC News/Wall Street Journal numbers are right, he should be. Ideology has been increasingly linked to party identification, which, in turn, has been increasingly tied to voting patterns. Were there to be fewer conservatives, Republicans would have a harder time winning elections.
Still, I’m not ready to declare this a trend; data from the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey may be an outlier. Every month or two, the foundation sponsors a survey that asks Americans about the health-care system. At the end of these surveys, people are asked whether they identify as liberal, conservative or moderate. To my knowledge, the Kaiser poll is the only survey besides the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll to regularly ask and release data about ideological self-identification. I have averaged all the Kaiser foundation surveys in each year going back to 2007. For 2015, there are more than 4,500 respondents.
?w=610&h=474
...snip...
The Kaiser poll does show that more people identified as liberal this year than in any other year since 2007. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found the same thing. In the Kaiser data, this seems to continue a trend from 2014, which also found a higher percentage of liberals than in previous years.
Two observations:
First, while "liberal" is going up, it's still below "moderate". This is why some of us advocate for more mainstream candidates: because that's where the bulk of the voters are (liberal only: 25%; liberal+moderate: 60%)
Second, while some Sanders supporters have suggested that there's been growth in disaffected liberals-who-became-independents that he can appeal to, it appears that the share of liberal independents has remained exactly the same:
