You know this is important polling news, because the establishment media is pretending it doesn't exist.
You can't find a relevant reference to it in searches on "Gallup" at the New York Times, AP.org, the Washington Post, or the LA Times. A Google News search on "Gallup conservatives outnumber liberals" (not in quotes) comes up with all of eight results.
The news isn't just that self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals nationwide. That's old hat. The big news from Gallup is that conservatives outnumber liberals in every state in the union, including supposedly uberliberal Vermont and Massachusetts.
Note the Gallup story's clearly impertinent headline, accompanied by an absolutely wrong subheadline (HTs to LifeNews.com, CNS News [linked by Drudge], and an e-mailer):
Political Ideology: "Conservative" Label Prevails in the South
Conservatives outnumber liberals in nearly every state, but not in D.C.The strength of "conservative" over "liberal" in the realm of political labels is vividly apparent in Gallup's state-level data, where a significantly higher percentage of Americans in most states -- even some solidly Democratic ones -- call themselves conservative rather than liberal.
.... Despite the Democratic Party's political strength -- seen in its majority representation in Congress and in state houses across the country -- more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal. While Gallup polling has found this to be true at the national level over many years, and spanning recent Republican as well as Democratic presidential administrations, the present analysis confirms that the pattern also largely holds at the state level. Conservatives outnumber liberals by statistically significant margins in 47 of the 50 states, with the two groups statistically tied in Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts.
The margins may not be "statistically significant," but the reported result still shows conservatives on top in HI (+5), VT (+1) and MA (+1). I also have to wonder how you can have a 5-point or more margin of error in a poll of 160,000 people. (Update: Oh, those are for the individual states, not the entire poll; I should have known that.)
As to how Gallup's online report was organized, the answer is "not well." Sorry guys, it's not exactly news that the conservative label prevails in the South, so why did you emphasize and lead with that obvious point? The news is that conservatism prevails at least slightly in each and every state; the District of Columbia, despite Democrats' fondest wishes, is not a state. It was also "clever" of Gallup to save its 50-state table for Page 2 of its three-page report.
It's hard not to wonder if someone at Gallup did what they did with the headline and subheadline to help ensure that establishment media outlets ignored this stunning news. I would suggest that they didn't have to work that hard; the media would have ignored it anyway.
A final bit of good news: The poll was taken over a spread-out period from January through June. I don't think anyone would want to bet against the percentage of self-identifying conservatives being higher at the end of the polling period than it was in the beginning.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
