The Ambivalent Majority!

Well, plurality, anyway.

The Pew Research Center asked a sampling of Americans six questions carefully designed to plot their location on a grid of four ideological positions -- conservative, liberal, libertarian, and populist. The six questions with their total survey answers:

Economic Issues Sphere

Favor government guaranteeing health insurance for all (65% yes, 30% no)
Government regulation needed to protect public interest (49% yes, 41% no)
Favor private retirement accounts for Social Security (54% yes, 30% no)

Social Issues Sphere

Favor legalizing gay/lesbian marriage (32% yes, 61% no)
Oppose banning books with "dangerous ideas" from school libraries (51% yes, 44% no)
Worry government too involved in promoting morality (51% yes, 41% no)

Respondents' patterns of response to these questions fell into four distinct groups -- and one indistinct one.

"Liberals" tend to favor an active role for government in regulating the economy, but oppose government attempts to regulate morality or private life in the social sphere. "Conservatives" take just the opposite approach, preferring a smaller role for government in the economy but a bigger role for it in promoting morality. [ . . . ]

[T]he two other important U.S. political traditions [are] libertarian and populist [ . . . ]

Americans espousing a "libertarian" ideology oppose government regulation in both the economic and the social spheres. "Populists," by contrast, favor an active role for government in both the economic and the social spheres

The majority of Americans, 58%, can be ideologically pigeonholed, but they are fractured among the four quadrants: 18% liberal, 16% populist, 15% conservative, and 9% libertarian. By far the single biggest group, at 42%, was . . . AMBIVALENT! A.K.A. non-ideological: "people with a mixture of views, or who declined to offer opinions on several of the six questions in the test."

The demographic breakdown of the groups is quite fascinating. Liberals are far and away the most educated (no great surprise there). More libertarians are men (especially young men); more ambivalents, liberals, and populists are women. White Protestants and frequent churchgoers are the most conservative AND populist. Libertarians skew west, populists skew south.

This can tell you a great deal about political coalitions, about the current isolation of liberals, and above all, the volatility and alienation of the huge, ambivalent "swing vote" -- an enormous well for the right centrist candidate to tap into. Go see.

(Thanks to Mike McGillicuddy.)

Cross-posted on Donklephant