A Democrat discusses the shift to the right among Independent Voters
William Galston in TNR discusses this chart from a Pew poll of 1800 adults and finds major shifts in the electorate — particularly among Independent voters — over the last five years:
58 percent of voters see Democrats as liberal or very liberal, while 56 percent see Republicans as conservative or very conservative; no surprise there. But voters now place themselves much closer to the Republican Party than to the Democratic Party on this left-right continuum…
startlingly, the electorate places itself a bit closer to the Tea Party movement (which is well to the right of the Republican Party) than to the Democratic Party. All this represents a major shift from five years ago, when mean voters placed themselves exactly halfway between their ideological perceptions of the Democratic and Republican parties…
Twenty-four percent of Democrats describe themselves as conservative or very conservative, while only 5 percent of Republicans call themselves liberal or very liberal. Conversely, 65 percent of Republicans think of themselves as conservative or very conservative, while only 42 percent of Democrats self-identify as liberal or very liberal. This helps explain why 83 percent of Republicans see the Democratic Party as more liberal than they themselves are—while only 60 percent of Democrats place the Republican Party to the right of where they place themselves…
Shifts among Independents are especially notable. A Pew survey in June 2005 found that Independents considered the Republican Party to be twice as distant from them ideologically as the Democratic Party. Today, Independents see the Democratic Party as three times farther away than the Republican Party.
None of this should be surprising. It has become obvious to any who have eyes to see that the country is being governed from the Left of the Democratic Party, which wing includes a fair number of the 32% of Democrats who see the nation as “basically unfair and discriminatory.” But even if the GOP is successful in November, the Party has another thing coming if it thinks it can go back to business as usual in these parlous times.
July 29th, 2010 at 10:11 pm
I’ve been and remain a moderate conservative and a registered Independent. I would be more inclined toward the Democratic party were it not for their non-reflective advocacy for social issues that take precedence over the original intent of the founders of America. Chief among these concerns, though not the only one, is the liberal bias against religion that the left and the Supreme Court demonstrate in the reinterpretation of the separation of Church and State. The founders never intended that religion be considered counter productive to the state. Religion was never intended to be a “private” thing in the sense that it should not be apparent in the social and political institutions. One need read only the diaries of Thomas Jefferson, John Q. Adams, Benjamen Franklin, Daniel Webster and virtually all of the founding fathers to see how central religion was to their lives. Of course, they never advocated that any religion or denomination be established. But they never ever relegated religion to something to be done in private. Indeed the Capital building was also used as a church from 1880 until the 1890s.