Posted on 11/03/2005 2:53:40 PM PST by smoothsailing
Still Great News in the Battleground Poll
by Bruce Walker
03 November 2005
Conservatives are winning, and winning convincingly, the ideological battle for the hearts and minds of Americans.
I have written articles soon after the various Battleground Polls have come out over the last three years. People trained, like the dull, illiterate drones in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, are accustomed to acquiring information only from images, with tools like bright colors replacing, as much as possible, the precise data of words and of numbers. These dullards are also conditioned to believe that if information is important, it will be presented in a pie graph or line chart.
This, of course, is nonsense. Give me an ideological agenda and I will give you a statistical image to prove that point -- which is something that I have been pointing out in a series of articles over the last several years as soon as the Battleground Poll is released. Nothing has changed.
Read the Battleground Poll website itself (to say nothing of the even more skewed lurid descriptions by the mainstream media describing the horrible problems that conservatives face in the election a year from now.) Perhaps it helps the reader for me to quote from my past articles. My text, drawn from the guts of the data, shows the true picture of America and the trend of that electorate.
This is the foundation from which silly, ad hoc questions about transitory opinion regarding particular issues, political figures or political parties ought to derive. The reason for this disconnection between profound political facts and ephemeral polling data is that conservative politicians, parties and pundits panic too easily.
Go to the Battleground Poll and skip down through all the flashy and alarming graphs and charts. Skip also the approval of the parties to handle problems, the highly volatile intention now -- a year before the general election! -- as well. Ignore the popularity of a second term president nearing the second half of his second term: no president, Reagan, FDR or Eisenhower has done well, personally, at this point in his presidency.
The results also show progress, not a malaise. The problem is that this good news, better with each Battleground Poll, is ignored. It is not used, as it should be used, to win battles and permanently shift the balance of ideological power in America. All of the muscle to win the battles exists; it simply needs to be rallied to clear and unapologetic causes. Does this sound overly rosy?
Consider that in June 2002, in the salient question D3 of the poll, fifty-nine percent of the American people called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative," while thirty-five percent of Americans called themselves "liberal" or "very liberal." Excluding those who called themselves "moderate" or expressed "no opinion," conservative voters constituted about sixty-one percent of the voters.
In September 2003, the percentage of Americans who called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" was fifty-nine percent, while the number of Americans who called themselves "liberal" or "very liberal" remained at precisely thirty-five percent – a gap between conservatives and liberals of twenty-four percentage points. Excluding the few Americans who called themselves "moderate" or had no opinion, conservatives had the same whopping sixty-one percent majority.
One year later, in September 2004, the percentage of Americans who called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" had risen slightly to sixty percent, while the number of Americans who considered themselves "liberal" or "very liberal" had dropped to thirty-four percent -- leaving exactly the same gap between conservative and liberal of twenty-four percentage points.
Given all the doomsday pundits -- both of the Right and of the Left -- one might expect that the brand new Battleground Poll would show big changes. There were changes, but not in the way that pundits would expect.
The number of Americans who call themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" increased by two percentage points to sixty-one percent, as high as it has ever been in any Battleground Poll. Now sixty-one percent of Americans consider themselves "conservative" or "very conservative," while, again, precisely thirty-five percent of Americans consider themselves "liberal" or "very liberal" -- the gap between conservatives and liberals has actually widened by two full percentage points.
That, however, is only part of the good news for conservatives. The good news -- the great news, really -- is what has happened to the intensity of American political opinion and the direction of that intensity. The number of people who call themselves "moderate" or express "no opinion" or "do not know" has dropped from the six percent or seven percent in past polls to only four percent today. Where have these people been going?
In 2002, the number of Americans who considered themselves "strongly conservative" was fifteen percent; in 2004 the number of Americans who considered themselves "strongly conservative" had risen to seventeen percent; the latest Battleground Poll shows that the number of Americans who considered themselves "strongly conservative" has risen to twenty-one percent, almost three times as many Americans as there are who consider themselves "strongly liberal."
Conservatives are winning, and winning convincingly, the ideological battle for the hearts and minds of Americans. The number of conservatives and strong conservatives is growing, and the number of liberals is shrinking. What America needs right now is a political battle in which the lines are clear. If we have that, conservatives will win. The Battleground Poll numbers show an unmistakable, steady and compelling shift to a big conservative majority. It is time we used that majority to change America.
Bruce Walker's articles can be found at the Conservative Truth.
Conservatives, on the other hand, have a tougher product to sell. But their forthrightness lends them a credibility that softens the harshness of their position.
It all comes down to this: do you want a nice guy who lies to you, or a ba$tard who tells you the truth?
Good post.
Um...isn't that 26%?
Most doctors will tell you the truth, with compassion. So I don't think it's an either/or as you portray it.
Nor do I think the liberal position, ideologically, is "pretty good." It's based on a tissue of lies. Take, for ex., the basis of all liberalism/marxism/socialism, the "labor theory of value," which says, essentially, that all labor is valuable and you should therefore be rewarded JUST for doing work. When you do not create value for someone else---yet you still (through government edict) get rewarded---you are engaging in pure selfishness. This is not as it is always portrayed by the left---as a grand, benevolent, selfless "sharing."
Kerry Lies..Kerry cheats....whatdoyaknowaboutthat? Jake
Chicago voted twice, remember?
You mean in Ohio, right? Because Bush won by millions in the popular vote.
So how the hell come didn't Bush win in a pop vote and electoral college LANDSLIDE like REAGAN in 80-84 and his father in 88
Yep. I figure fraud is worth a couple of million votes to the Slave Party, but numbers like those cited above would easily overwhelm such an effort. They don't. Fruther, conservatives are usually more likely to show up at the polls.
Good news.
The theocrats scare many people who are otherwise Conservative away
Sure, that's it.
Yeah, but don't let that bother you. Just put that in with the 20 or 30 things about the Battleground Poll that we're supposed to ignore.
Because Reagan and Bush Sr. didn't have that political genius Karl Rove!
It's all in how you communicate the message. President Reagan was the greatest at this; we haven't had anyone like that rise up through the GOP ranks in recent years.
And Bush came within the same number of votes of winning 5 or 6 more states.
And Cleveland, not to be outdone, voted THRICE! Still didn't help the Surrender Monkey from Massachusetts.
Not in 2004....both bases were pretty equally mobilized. I work in Philadelphia and it was literally a zoo. I'm assuming a similar situation occurred in other Blue states as well. Not many lines but oddly enough, Philly voted at 100% of registered voters, with 80% going to Kerry. Except for Philly and one or two suburbs, and Allegheny County which encompasses Pittsburg, the rest of the state is pretty strongly Red. In those areas, there were lines in which people waited for hours (I guess the reason that there weren't lines in the city is that dead people don't have to wait.)
Still closer than the number above would indicate.
The number of Americans who call themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" increased by two percentage points to sixty-one percent, as high as it has ever been in any Battleground Poll.
Did Kerry actively campaign as a Liberal? NO. His whole campaign, backed up by a Billion dollar free advertising campaign in the Dinosaurs Media, was based wholly on "Hate Bush always". All his plans were "secret". He never actually came out and said what HE would do.
Imagine that. The Slave Party must really have command of the numbers in order not to exceed the limit.
Just think: if they were as good at running a government or a business as they are at manufacturing votes those thugs might be in power.
That was so patently transparent that you would have to assume people were too stupid to see through it.
Philly is a world unto itself, in many ways even worse than NYC. After all, our current mayor's numbers went up AFTER it was disclosed that the Feds had bugged his office.
This is the paradox the Republican Party must deal with, will they attempt to expand their base by becoming more conservative or to try to attract "moderates"(whatever that means) and "liberals" ( a fool's errand).
W's administration does a very VERY poor job in defending itself. If the Bush administration had a better marketing strategy, he would sit at 60% approval. There's no good reason for the Iraq war to be in doubt popular approval wise, there's no good reason for Social Security reform to be D.O.A., there's no good reason for school vouchers to be improbable politically. Bush just doesn't fight for his policies or his administration, he and Rove are just enamored w/ the rope a dope strategy, yet at some point these things need to be *solved*. Social Security, standards in education, energy independence, you have to hit back in order to solve these problems.
Plus, we can mock Kerry's liberal record, but he desperately tried to run as a centrist, and probably came off as such to at least a million voters who voted for him.
Can't argue with your evaluation of the Bush Administration at all
Maddening ain't it
If that is the case, then allowing Philly wardheelers to hijack the election in that manner just made all you red voters irrelevant.
I guess if there's a message here it's although 61% consider themselves conservative many of them don't vote Republican.
That's some sobering info in the tracking poll. The Republicans obviously have work to do.
Yes, it did. And year after year after year, the Republican party just turns their head and shrugs, puts up the same candidate (Sam Katz has run for mayor the last two elections), does no detectable voter outreach (until maybe 2 months before the election. That last one is actually the killer, I think. The Republican Party in Pennsylvania (but also I think nationally, as well) regards voter outreach as something only to be done at election time. While it's true that election time is when most people pay attention to the issues, the time in between is when you need to be laying all the groundwork and actually educating people about how you're supposedly different from the other party or parties. The Philadelphia vote is one reason that Ed Rendell is Governor at the moment (another being that the Republicans ran a candidate who would have made Al Gore seem animated!)
You mean if Kerry would have won Ohio where President Bush won by 118000 votes.
With this logic President Bush would have won PA if he got 75000 votes more, and WI if he got 6000 votes more, and MN if he got 5000 votes more. This is a total 41 electoral votes compare to Ohio 20 electoral votes. In fact MN and WI together have the same electoral votes as Ohio.
Your point is immaterial my questioning the content of the article, and in fact reinforces what I was saying: Were the fraction of self-professed "conservatives" as high as is indicated in the article, the election would not have been as close as it was.
Succint.
BUMP
That's an excellent analysis - - quick and to the point.
Liberals do have an easier sell - - "free" stuff for everybody except "the rich".
Is it any wonder they like to control the education mafia?
He didn't come within 60,000 votes.
Well, close in a state that might not share the same breakdown that the BG poll found.
Fact is, a presidential election isn't one election; it's 50 separate elections on the same day.
Now 60% of Americans are conservative, but note that this is for the whole country. There are more than 60% conservatives in some states (Alabama, the Dakotas, Oklahoma, etc) and a lot less than 60% in others (Mass, RI, VT, HI, etc). The BG poll numbers can still be reconcilled, especially if the number of conservatives in Ohio were less than 60 percent (say 50.5%).
As far as relying on exit polls from last year, well, they had Kerry winning, so the data from them is a little more than suspect.
Ping
To the average citizen, yes, it is. It extols compassion, "vision," and love of man for his fellow man. It empowers the weak and downtrodden at the expense of the greedy and powerful. It makes up for all the "flaws" in God's creation.
It's based on a tissue of lies.
Which is why the THEORY -- the image Liberals sell -- is so much more than the REALITY -- the end product people get. It's also why millions die at the hands of so-called compassionate socialists. As citizens realize with horror the absolute paucity of the promises they've been given, their rebellion must be contained at a cost in blood. Socialism is the ultimate Procrustean "solution."
Take ... the "labor theory of value ..."
Marx would disagree with your assessment. He would regard labor itself as ultimate fulfillment, especially if its benefits were directed toward the collective. Contrast that with the labor theory of capital, in which your labors go primarily to benefit some capitalist overlord.
For what it's worth, my characterization was intended to be a tongue-in-cheek oversimplification -- an aphorism, not an analysis.
Marx would only "disagree" because Marx lied about everything. Marx well knew that if anyone understood what he was peddling, no one would buy it. That's why he concocted this network of jargon, "classes," "exploitation," "reinvested dead substance," "proletariat," and so on. Marx was not nearly as smart as many people give him credit for being.
Your description of Marx could well extend to the ideology of his disciples. They too are jargon-wielding, self-impressed liars who aren't nearly as smart as people credit them with being.
I agree, but Thomas Sowell has an excellent book, "Marxism," where he debunks Marx from a Marxist point of view. It's an odd book.
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