With younger voters leaning more liberal and President Trump struggling to push his approval rating into positive territory, a massive new survey from Gallup shows that the voting edge conservatives have is shrinking and the number of liberal states is rising.
“As the U.S. political landscape shifted slightly left in 2017, net-conservatism within most states also fell. In the process, the most and least conservative states remained largely the same, but a few states fell out of the net-conservative column for the first time,” said the analysis published Tuesday.
The survey looked at political ideology and its dominance in a state.
In its over 180,000 interviews, Gallup said that those who call themselves conservative shrunk after Trump’s election. In 2017, conservatives held a nine point edge, 35 percent to 26 percent.
“This is down,” said Gallup, “from 11 points in 2016, 15 points in 2008 and 19 points in 1992.”
And when it comes to states, Gallup said that as recently as 2010 all 50 states leaned right.
Now, only 39 are conservative, a one-year drop from 44 in 2016. Rhode Island, California, Oregon, Maryland and Washington all shifted to the liberal column.
Gallup’s findings suggest that the trend will continue. According to the survey giant:
Nationally, conservatism was on the lower end in 2017 after varying in a narrow range over the past two decades, while liberalism has steadily increased. What happens next isn’t highly predictable, except to say that it may partly depend on how Americans view the leader of the party most associated with political conservatives — Republican President Donald Trump. His subpar job approval rating in 2017 may have starved conservatism of the political fuel needed to thrive while helping to feed liberalism.
However, bigger forces are also at work, including demographics — with younger liberal adults replacing older conservatives in the population — as well as increasing support for liberal positions on same-sex marriage, marijuana legalization and a host of other social issues possibly changing how some Americans define their broader ideological and political views.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
