Idelological Placement Of Voters/Candidates

Ken AshfordElection 2008Leave a Comment

Interesting chart from the Pew Center:

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A couple of things that strike me:

(1)  Voters (on average, of course) are slightly to the conservative side of moderate.  However, when you look at party breakdown, Republicans generally see themselves as being much further from moderate than Democrats.  In other words, the average Democratic voter is closer to "moderate" than to "liberal", whereas the average Republican voter is closer to "conservative" than to "moderate".

(2)  Democrats and Republicans view the GOP lineup almost the same.  But Republicans push all the Democrats comically far to the left.

(3)  In fact, Clinton Derangement Syndrome is clearly visible, as Republicans push her waaaaaay to the left — left of Obama — and somewhere in Josef Stalin regions.  Democrats (correctly, in my view), recognize that Hillary is much closer to being a moderate than Obama, and indeed not extremely liberal at all.

(4)  It’s interesting that Giuliani is viewed as being "to the left" of his GOP counterparts.  Of all of them, Giuliani is the most fiscally conservative, and the farthest right on international policy (i.e., starting wars).  Clearly, these assessments were made on metric of social policy, where Giuliani (being pro-choice, etc.) truly is far more liberal than his opponents.