Chris Bowers today points to a fascinating survey on ideology and entertainment choices by the Zogby/Lear center. Among other things, the poll assigned ideological preference to respondents, instead of relying on respondents' self-described preferences. The results? 39% of the country is grouped as a "blue" person, 37% as a "red" person, and 24% "purple". That's a far cry from exit poll self-identification numbers, where typically about 33% of the country self-identifies as conservative, 20% self-identifies as liberal, and the remainder are called moderates.
This disparity is fascinating. If you look at the data (PDF), on page 3 you'll see that cultural liberals are almost exactly equally likely to identify as a Democrat, and to have voted for Kerry, as cultural conservatives are likely to identify as a Republican, and to have voted for Bush. In fact, "correct" partisan identification is slightly higher among liberals than conservatives! There is a slight fall-off in the presidential vote - 95.6% of liberals voted for Kerry, 98.6% of conservatives for Bush - but essentially, it looks like both Bush and Kerry maximized their respective cultural bases. And Kerry actually got slightly more votes from his base (37.3% of the overall vote was cultural liberals voting for Kerry) than Bush got from his (36.5% of the overall vote was cultural conservatives voting for Bush.)
This result is astounding and a little unsettling for me - a large part of my reason for starting this site was to examine cultural changes that could produce more cultural liberals and a larger liberal base for future elections. Now it looks like that cause might be a bit like squeezing blood from a turnip. This data also calls into question Chris's theory that politics doesn't matter, which essentially supposes that the best politicians can do is try to shift cultural trends in a direction that is friendly to them, and then to get the hell out of the way. It looks like Bush's 2004 campaign did indeed overcome a slight 0.8% deficit in the cultural base vote, and thereby mattered a heck of a lot in that election.
