A new Gallup poll reveals that half of the top ten most ideologically liberal states are in the northeast: Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Four of the remaining five are in the west: Oregon, Hawaii, Washington, and California. The remaining member of the top ten is Washington, D.C., another upper east coast liberal enclave. Those 757s carrying passengers between between east liberal hell and west liberal hell are flying over the clearest thinking sections of America.
The top three most conservative states are in the south: Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. With the exception of South Carolina, the rest of ten most conservative states are also in “fly-over country”: Idaho, Oklahoma, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Arkansas.
Perhaps this poll’s most meaningful statistic is one which has varied little in decades. Nationwide, conservative to moderate people outnumber liberals by a factor of 3.6 to 1. More than three-quarters of Americans see themselves as conservative or moderate as opposed to only a tad over one-fifth who see themselves as liberal. And across the country, conservatives alone — not counting moderates at all — outnumber liberals by a factor of 2 to 1 in true west states like Arizona and New Mexico and by a whopping 3.5 to 1 in Mississippi, with even the most liberal state in the entire union, Vermont, still showing more conservatives than liberals by a small margin.
Unfortunately, the pervasive outnumbering of liberals by conservatives has still not erased a holdover from old times. In most states the number of registered Democrats still exceeds the number of registered Republicans. Study after study has found this to be caused by people registering as Democrats regardless of ideological inclination due to family tradition, now-defunct state laws requiring one to be a Democrat to vote in certain elections or primaries, and other bizarre reasons.
A huge takeaway from this poll is the existence of those deep blue edges on an otherwise decidedly red America. Funny, isn’t it, that the states with the most crippling economic problems are also the ones with the most liberals? Funny like a boil on your butt during a horseback ride.
