E.J. Dionne's Response to Kristol

If I were a conservative, I would probably tout the new Gallup study showing that conservatives now outnumber moderates, as Bill Kristol did in his column on Tuesday. But I’d be wary of making too much of what is a rather small shift in the ideological self-description of Americans. And out of curiosity, I checked around with other pollsters to see what they were finding. The results were mixed.

First, those Gallup numbers: Forty percent of Americans describe their political views as conservative, 36 percent as moderate, and 20 percent as liberal. “This marks a shift from 2005 through 2008, when moderates were tied with conservatives as the most prevalent group,” Gallup reported of its study based on combining16 surveys for a sample of 16,321. The shift from 2008 is hardly startling. Conservatives were up three points from 2008, moderates down one and liberals down two.

On the other hand, the country was ever so slightly less conservative in the most recent third quarter of the year than it was in the second quarter: According to Gallup, the conservatives’ advantage over moderates went from 6 points in the second quarter to 3 points in the recent quarter. It’s not exactly clear which way the trend is running.Of course these are all small shifts, and that’s the point: We are not going through some ideological revolution.

I was curious how Gallup’s findings squared with those of other pollsters, so I asked Jon Cohen of The Post and Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center to run some of their numbers for me, which they kindly did.In the 2009 Post/ABC News surveys, moderates still lead conservatives. The average for the year: 39 percent moderate, 36 percent conservative, 22 percent liberal. In only one survey did the conservatives “lead” the moderates, by 38 percent to 36 percent.

Conservatives will be happy to know that was in the most recent survey.At Pew, Keeter divided his surveys in half, from January to the end of June and from July to the present. In the January to June surveys (involving 10,630 interviews), the Pew numbers were: 37.9 percent moderate, 36.9 percent conservative and 19.7 percent liberal

In the Pew surveys since July, there was a shift (of 1.6 percent) toward the conservatives. The numbers were: 38.5 percent conservative, 35.5 percent moderate and 20.1 percent liberal.
Keeter described the 1.6 percent shift toward “conservative” as “on the borderline of statistical significance” and the movement as “glacial.”

It’s important to note that there is a debate over what these ideological labels actually mean to voters. And polls that give respondents the chance of calling themselves “progressive” produce a substantially larger number on the left end of the spectrum, since many who won’t pick the “liberal” label do call themselves “progressive.” A study earlier this year by the Center for American Progress found that when progressive and libertarian were offered as additional options, the country was split almost exactly in half between left and right.

The upshot of the recent polls is that conservatives can be pleased that they are very much in business, and they may be doing just a bit better with George W. Bush out of the White House. But shifts this small and inconclusive shouldn’t make the headlines. In particular, when everyone analyzes (and spins) next week’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey and New York’s 23rd congressional district, they should rely on the local exit polls and actual votes and not on these marginal shifts in national polls. I’d also caution against overanalyzing the results from these contests, but such a warning would be useless: of course these races will be overanalyzed, and I’ll probably be guilty doing some of that myself.