CNN exit poll<\/a> conducted during last Tuesday’s general election.<\/p>\nThe survey found that 34% of Americans define themselves as conservative. By contrast, only 22% of voters say they’re liberal.<\/p>\n
Sounds pretty definitive, right? I mean, that still looks like a huge conservative advantage. Perhaps Tuesday’s election was an anomaly? <\/p>\n
Unfortunately for Republicans, the picture is far more treacherous.<\/p>\n
For one thing, Americans who describe themselves as “conservative” have grown increasingly comfortable with things that card-carrying “movement conservatives” despise.<\/p>\n
Things like increased government aid for the poor, more Federal involvement in the economy, universal health care, and robust environmental programs.<\/p>\n
They also engage in private social behaviors that The Right opposes, ranging from divorce to abortion to same-sex relationships.<\/p>\n
These self-identifying conservatives are so wayward, in fact, that one out of five actually voted for Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate.<\/p>\n
(By contrast, only one in ten “liberals” voted for John McCain.)<\/p>\n
Give conservatives credit. They succeeded in making the label “conservative” attractive. People like to describe themselves that way.<\/p>\n
But the movement has failed to convince those same voters to share much of their agenda.<\/p>\n
And there’s a bigger problem. <\/p>\n
Conservatives prefer to side-step the fact that the biggest chunk of voters in that exit survey (44%) describe themselves as moderates.<\/p>\n
A whopping 60% of those voters chose Obama, an African American candidate described by Republicans as a “socialist” and the “most liberal Democrat in the Senate.”<\/p>\n
“I think this begs the question as to what self-described ‘moderates’ mean when they label themselves that way,” wrote Andrew Stuttaford, in the conservative National Review.<\/p>\n“My guess is that the very idea of what a ‘moderate’ is has shifted quite some way to the left of late. In many respects, the right’s key job over the next four years will be to push it back again.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This Big Push is made more difficult by the fact that Democrats are winning decisively among every demographic group — young people, educated professionals, Hispanics, and Asian Americans — that is growing in numbers.<\/p>\n
Republicans are leading in only two demographics, both of which are dwindling in clout: rural and elderly voters.<\/p>\n
It may be time for conservative leaders to stop talking and start listening.<\/p>\n
Listen first to Americans who describe themselves as conservative. What do those 34% of voters think the Right’s agenda should be? What issues matter to them?<\/p>\n
And why did a big chunk of them vote for a Democrat in 2008?
<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A mantra among Republicans — especially within the right-leaning world of think-tanks and talk radio […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}