I have been writing for several years now about the Battleground Poll, perhaps the most respected and trusted of all political polls. The poll reveals much more data than most other polls and the questions asked are comprehensive. A Republican polling organization and a Democrat polling organization collaborate on all aspects of the polling process. The Battleground Poll is only conducted about once every eight or nine months. The internals of the poll are available to anyone.
Each time the Battleground Poll comes out I analyze the hidden data. Each time I have found reason to write a positive article about what I found. My last article, “The Greatest News Yet,” was in October 2006, just before the general election in which Republicans lost both houses of Congress. In that article I note that in the six previous Battleground Polls – April 2002, April 2003, September 2003, August 2004, October 2005, and March 2006 – the crucial data was the question about how many people polled considered themselves “very conservative,” “conservative,” “liberal,” “very liberal,” “moderate,” or “not know.”
In each of those bipartisan polls over the prior four and a half years, the American people overwhelmingly consider themselves either “conservative” or “very conservative,” as opposed to “liberal,” “very liberal,” “moderate,” or “not know.” In the October 2006 Battleground Poll, just before Republicans were routed, the results were virtually the same. Sixty-one percent of Americans considered themselves either “conservative” or “very conservative,” while only thirty-four percent of Americans considered themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” Five percent of Americans either called themselves “moderate” or “not know.”
So, something must have changed dramatically between October and November or between October and today, right? Wrong. The Battleground Poll released in late January 2007 showed that fifty-nine percent of the American people considered themselves either “conservative” or “very conservative,” while only thirty-four percent of Americans considered themselves either “liberal” or “very liberal.” Seven percent were “moderates” or “not know.”
The gap of twenty-five percentage points between self-identified conservatives and liberals is a wider gap than in five of the seven prior Battleground Polls, although all of the polls show almost identical results. The number of Americans who consider themselves conservative has never been lower than fifty-nine percent and the number of Americans who consider themselves liberal has never been higher thirty-eight percent.
Perhaps more telling is that the number of Americans who consider themselves “very liberal” is only six percent while the number of Americans who consider themselves “very conservatives” is twenty-one percent. Winning elections is not a question of winning the hearts and minds of moderate or undecided voters. Winning elections is simply a matter of convincing conservative voters than you are a conservative. This may have something to do with the reason that Ronald Reagan, the most popular Republican president of the Twentieth Century, was also perceived as the most conservative Republican president of the Twentieth Century.
Over the last five years the American people have been saying exactly the same thing in the Battleground Poll. It is the politicians who seem to be listening more to the Leftist establishment media than the people who our elected officials are supposed to be representing. Americans want conservative government.
Bruce Walker has been a published author in print and in electronic media since 1990. He is a regular contributor to WebCommentary, Conservative Truth, American Daily, Enter Stage Right, Intellectual Conservative, NewsByUs and MenŐs News Daily. His first book, Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie by Outskirts Press was published in January 2006.
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