hypocritexposer
Well-known member
Gallup’s recent modeling of the vote for Congress finds 54% of likely voters identifying themselves as politically conservative, while moderates are in conspicuously short supply compared with recent midterms. Also, Republicans make up a larger share of the electorate in Gallup’s initial 2010 likely voter pool — greater than their 1994 share — than do Democrats, and the gap is even more pronounced once the leanings of independents are taken into account. …
The composition of likely voters appears to have become more politically polarized, with the proportions of conservatives and liberals expanding since 1994 at moderates’ expense. However, Gallup’s initial 2010 estimate of likely voters shows a particularly sharp jump in the percentage of conservatives, from 42% in 2006 to 54% today, and a decline in the percentage of moderates, from 37% to 27%.
This ideological change is accompanied by a concomitant shift toward Republicans, who have a nine-percentage-point advantage over Democrats in the likely voter pool: 39% vs. 30% at this point, one month before the elections. This exceeds the GOP’s five- and six-point advantages in Gallup’s final pre-election polls in 1994 and 2002, respectively, and is a reversal from 1998 and 2006, when Democrats slightly outnumbered Republicans.
Once the “leanings” of independents are taken into account, the majority of the 2010 electorate, 57%, identifies either as Republicans or as independents who lean Republican, compared with 39% identifying as or leaning Democratic. The previous high was 51% in 2002.
Bottom Line
Gallup's first sketch of what the electorate may look like on Nov. 2 indicates that the enthusiasm gap favoring Republicans all year -- as well as the "thought" gap evident in a late August survey -- may well translate into highly disproportionate turnout among Republicans and conservatives on Election Day. That is a key reason Gallup's latest polling finds Republican candidates leading Democrats by 13- and 18-point margins, depending on turnout, in two estimates of the vote. Another is that political independents are aligning themselves with the Republican Party to a degree unprecedented in recent history.
In contrast to these extraordinary political patterns, the demographic composition of likely voters looks fairly normal relative to the profile of the electorate in 2006, as well as consistent with the trends seen since 1994 toward an older, more well-educated, and less substantially white, electorate.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/143468/Likely-Voters-Demographically-Typical-Skew-Conservative.aspx?utm_source=tagrss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=syndication&utm_term=Politics