Conservatives Outnumber Liberals in 47 States, Including California, New York, Gallup Finds
Conservatives outnumber liberals in 47 out of 50 states, according to Gallup polling released Friday.
When respondents were asked to identify whether they were conservative, moderate or liberal, liberals outnumbered conservatives in only three states. In order from most liberal, they were Massachusetts, Vermont and Hawaii. If it were a state, the District of Columbia would have been the most liberal.
The margin of error for each state ranged from plus or minus three percentage points for most states to plus or minus six percentage points for the smallest states. When taking this uncertainty due to sampling into account, the three states where liberals outnumbered conservatives and eight additional states, New York, California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington, Connecticut and Delaware, can be considered a statistical tie.
The three most conservative states, in order from most conservative, were Mississippi, Alabama and Wyoming. In those states, the conservative advantage is, respectively, 36, 31.2 and 28.8 percentage points.
The states with the highest percentage of self-identified moderates were Delaware (43.9 percent), Rhode Island (41.2 percent) and North Dakota (40.8 percent).
The regional trend mirrors the electoral map. The most conservative states are mostly in the South and Western mountain states. The most liberal states are mostly in the Northeast and West coast.
Nationally, self-identified liberals have gained numbers in recent years and were at a record high in 2014, but still trail self-identified conservatives by a large margin. In 2014, the nation was 38 percent conservative, 34 percent moderate and 24 percent liberal.
In a blog post, Frank Newport, editor in chief at Gallup, pointed out that ideological self-identification will not reveal possible regional differences. A mountain West conservative might typically have differences with a Southern conservative, for instance.
"This overview of the ideology of states is based on self-descriptions using a general conservative to liberal scale, and thus measures how each American sums up his or her ideological bent. There can be significant divergences in more specific ideological positioning, such as between those who may be conservative or liberal on economic matters, while holding the opposite position on a social matters," he wrote.
The data is from all of Gallup's daily tracking surveys for 2014. While the sample size varied for each state, the total sample size for all states and D.C. was 177,034.
To find out where your state ranks, follow this link to the Gallup website.
