http://americanthinker.com/2014/09/gallup_battleground_and_conservatism.htmlSeptember 8, 2014
Gallup, Battleground, and Conservatism
By Bruce Walker
Within a few days, the Gallup Poll and the Battleground Poll provided more polling data that demonstrates just how much conservatives outnumber liberals in America. The Gallup Poll, in its August 26 “State by State: Key Metrics for 2014,” provided data that reveals that in all but three states – Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts – conservatives outnumber liberals.
This is consistent with all prior Gallup Poll results for many years. In a few of these polls, conservatives have outnumbered liberals in every state of the nation, and in a few of these polls, liberals outnumber conservatives in one or two of a handful of states. Nationally, this polling data shows that 36% of Americans call themselves conservative and 36% call themselves moderates, while 23% call themselves liberal.
Gallup is not a conservative-leaning organization. It is, in fact, very much at the center of the establishment that looks down at conservatives as yahoos and dimwits. Gallup does, however, care about its reputation as a polling organization. It sells data to businesses and related sorts of consumers. Lying about its polling methods or its data would be corporate suicide. Downplaying the significance of certain poll results, however, would be fine. That is precisely what Gallup has done.
How? Gallup briefly included the District of Columbia as a “state,” which allowed it to maintain that every “state” but one was conservative. Also, consider the news “headlines” given by Gallup to poll results that showed that every state or almost every state had more conservatives than liberals: (February 2013) "Alabama, North Dakota, Wyoming Most Conservative States,” (February 2011) "Mississippi rates as Most Conservative US State,” (August 2010) "Wyoming, Mississippi, Utah rank as Most Conservative States," (February 2010) "Ideology: Three Deep South States Most Conservative," or (August 2009) "Political Ideology: 'Conservative' Label Prevails in South."
The Battleground Poll, just announced in early September, shows exactly the same sort of pattern in ideological division of America. The August 2014 Battleground Poll shows that 58% of Americans call themselves “very conservative” or “somewhat conservative” and that 37% of Americans call themselves “very liberal” or “somewhat liberal.” Every single Battleground Poll – almost twenty over the last dozen years – shows almost exactly the same breakdown of America.
Ideological self-identification is the single most stable poll result in all the Battleground Polls. In fact, no major polling organization in America in the last fifty years has ever produced a poll that shows more liberals than conservatives in America, and the number of “self-identified” conservatives has actually drifted upward over the last several decades. As I noted in February 2013, even the left-leaning Public Policy Polling, basking in Obama's re-election, had to report that its polling data showed conservatives greatly outnumbering liberals in America.
Why, then, do so many conservatives seem unhappy and unwilling to accept good news? For the same reasons that when I have suggested that conservatives ought to contest Democrat primaries to try to nominate conservatives as Democrat candidates in state and congressional elections: many conservatives have been cowed into a state of hopelessness. “We can never win,” these grumpy conservatives seem to believe, “and so we should not even try.” This, of course, is precisely what the establishment left wants. When conservatives win, in any arena, invariably these conservatives are optimists.
Consider the two greatest conservatives of our lifetime: Reagan and Rush. The left tried everything it could to persuade American that Reagan and Rush were wildly outside the mainstream, but both men knew that that was another leftist lie. Without the sort of polling data that ought to inspire conservatives today, both men intuitively understood that conservatism was the giant, the hero, and the champion to most Americans and that the long, dreary jihad of leftism against conservatism has utterly failed.
It is leftism that cannot survive without the constant and loud din of failed rhetoric, thick and fetid streams of bribes to myriad disgruntled groups, and the tired repetition to their cadres and to America that leftism is the true majority. Why does the left lose ballot initiatives even in states like California? Why do even crypto-Marxists like Obama pretend to be “moderates”? Why does the left desperately – almost hysterically – fight for every single moment of the public voice in American life? Everyone – save, perhaps, a few demoralized conservatives – knows that leftism is wildly unpopular in practice and that America remains the most thoroughly and naturally conservative nation in human history.
