Here is Bruce Walker:
George Washington University announced on April 25 its latest Battleground Poll. The single most resilient datum in the history of that poll has been the persistent conservative majority. Nothing has changed. The responses to Question D3 of that poll show that 55% of Americans identify themselves as either “Very Conservative” or “Somewhat Conservative,” while 40% of Americans call themselves “Very Liberal” or “Somewhat Liberal.” Excluding those who don’t know or won’t respond, conservatives constitute 58% of Americans.
Every GWU Battleground Poll over the last sixteen years has shown the same overwhelming conservative majority in America. The size of the conservative majority has wiggled a bit over the last sixteen years, but the fact of a strong conservative majority – a majority enough to provide a landslide in any national election – has not changed at all.
This finding dovetails with Gallup polling data, which in every single state-by-state breakdown has shown that the overwhelming majority of states have more conservatives than liberals. As I noted in my February 6, 2016 article, the Gallup Poll in its last seven such state-by-state surveys has always found that conservatives outnumber liberals in at least 47 of the 50 states.
Other polling organizations have begun over the last few years to ask and to report ideological identification in polls. SurveyUSA in its February 2016 50-state poll reported that 40% of Americans consider themselves either “Very Conservative” or “Conservative,” while only 21% of Americans consider themselves “Very Liberal” or “Liberal.”
State polls, which are typically conducted by state media outlets, show the same surprising results. Consider, for example, the ideological balance in these “swing states” in presidential elections. In Nevada, 37% call themselves “Conservative” and 19% “Liberal.” In Colorado, 32% of respondents call themselves “Conservative,” and 21% call themselves “Liberal.” In Florida, the 2015 poll showed 35% of Floridians calling themselves “Conservative” and 20% calling themselves “Liberal,” and in 2016, the poll found that 42% called themselves either “Very Conservative” or “Conservative,” while 23% called themselves “Very Liberal” or “Liberal.”
Read more: American Thinker
Image credit: The Heritage Foundation.
