Gallup Poll tells the story...
According to a recent Gallup poll reported by Politico, Conservatives continue to make up the largest segment of political views in the country, outnumbering Liberals nearly two-to-one.
Of the 20,393 people polled from January through December of last year, Gallup found that 40 percent of Americans consider themselves to be Conservatives; 35 percent consider themselves Moderates; with 21 percent defining themselves as Liberals. These are the same figures Gallup found in 2010. More telling however, is that for the third straight year, Conservatives outnumbered both Moderates and Liberals.
According to previous polls by Gallup, it appears Moderates seemingly began turning into Conservatives in significant numbers in 2008 — just as they began losing their jobs in the Obama economy — while the percentage of Moderates has also declined steadily over the past two decades, from 43 percent 1992, to 35 percent in 2011.
Although the Republican Party is dominated by self-identified Conservatives who make up 71 percent, the Democratic Party is more evenly split — with 39 percent of viewing themselves as Liberals, and 38 percent as Moderates.
The wild card in all this is the Independents who are mostly moderate (41 percent), but lean more toward conservatism (35 percent) than liberalism (20 percent).
Meanwhile, both self-identified Conservatives and Liberals have risen in number since the early 1990s, which accounts for the growing political polarization America continues to suffer from.
However, the trend is clear, and correlates directly to the state of the economy. Ironically, it appears that Bill Clinton long ago understood something very basic that President Obama still fails to grasp — to quote Clinton… “It’s the economy stupid.”
How odd that the electorate has forgotten who created our economic mess in the first place and so now embrace the politics of Wall Street wolves and Neocons. Obama certainly has made some mistakes and he has not done enough to set things straight, but anyone with economics training knows that we'd be much worse off if his administration had not helped out the auto industry and prevented a further banking crisis. He certainly cannot be held accountable for big business sending jobs offshore or having pushed tax policies that favor businesses who shed jobs; nor is it even remotely true that most of the unemployment is directly correlated to the policies of his administration. Most, not all, of what I see and hear from the current crop of Republicans is a desire to return to economic policies that history has demonstrated do not work. There are some very good reasons why Canada has not suffered the same degree of banking failure that the U.S. had endured. We would be much better off having a TR, Eisenhower or (I can't believe I'm even writing this) a Nixon running for the Republican nomination.
ReplyDeleteNeal Perrine