America Is (Still) a Conservative Country

While we all sit around pondering the political universe while we’re waiting for Pennsylvania and Georgia and Nevada to announce final results, I would like to post a chart that I’ve posted many times before. It’s from Gallup, and it shows how many people consider themselves liberal vs. conservative:

The good news is that liberals have been making progress over the past few decades. The bad news is that we’re still a small minority. Only about a quarter of the country considers itself liberal, way behind the number who consider themselves conservative. Like it or not, this is the playing field. Here’s a breakdown by demographic group:

There is literally only one demographic group which is more than one-third liberal: people with postgraduate degrees. Every single other group—whether broken down by gender, age, income, race, or region—is well under a third liberal. Even among the youngest voters, only 30 percent consider themselves liberal.

I always hear a bunch of wishful thinking when I post this stuff, but none of it holds water. America is not yet a country that considers itself liberal, or even close to it. This is the underlying foundation of everything. Whatever your strategy for winning more elections, this is where you start from.

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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

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