Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
The new political divide pits conservatives against liberals and populists
The new political divide pits conservatives against liberals and populists
Mar 15, 2026 12:01 PM

The election of 2016 highlighted how politically divided we are as a nation. But the dividing line may not be where we had assumed.

For the past few decades the electorate has been viewed as divided almost equally between social and economic conservatives and social and economic liberals. But a recent study of voting patterns in the 2016 election reveals the old left-right divide is fractured and voters are clustered into four main groups.

The first group prised of Liberals, who are liberal on both economic and identity issues. At 44.6 percent, prise the largest voting demographic.

The second group is made up of Populists, people who are liberal on economic issues and conservative on identity issues. They are 28.9 percent of the population.

The third group is Conservatives, those who are conservative on both economic and identity issues. They are not only much smaller than the Liberals but even smaller than the Populists, making up only 22.7 percent of voters.

Finally, there are the Libertarians, who are conservative on economic issues and liberal on identity issues. prise a mere 3.8 percent of voters.

This scatterplot below shows how these groups aligned in the 2016 electorate.

Not surprisingly, Clinton voters are consistently liberal on both economic and identity issues. But notice that Trump voters are less conservative on identity issues than Clinton voters are liberal. And while Trump voters are clustered around the center-right on economic issues, few are strongly conservative on economics—and many are economically liberal.

Clinton won the majority of Liberals, while Trump won almost all of the Conservatives. But Trump also won 6.3 percent of the Liberal vote and gained the edge in winning over the Populists. Trump beat Clinton by about a 3-to-1 margin among the populists. Clinton won only 5.7 percent of the Populist vote, barely beating out the 4.3 percent of populists who supported third party candidates.

(Libertarians split almost equally between Clinton, Trump, and third party candidates like Johnson, proving that Liberaltarians do exist.)

So how did Trump win? As the report notes, largely by winning over the Populists—liberal on economic issues, conservative on identity issues—who had previously voted for Obama (about 8 percent of Populists had voted for Obama in 2012) or who had supported neither Obama nor Romney in 2012.

He also resonated with those who supported economically liberal positions—which now is the majority of the Republican party. If we look at primary voters, we find that Republicans—even Ted Cruz voters—were to the left of Clinton voters on attitudes about foreign trade. Trump voters were also to the left of every candidate but Kasich on economic inequality.

What does this portend for the GOP? As the report notes,

Republicans are about equally divided between economically liberal populists and more free-market-oriented conservatives. Republican primaries revealed a Kasich faction that is consistently more moderate across issues, a Trump faction that is more liberal on economic issues but more conservative on identity issues, and a Cruz faction that is more free market on economic issues and particularly conservative on moral issues.

[…]

Since Republicans have picked up more economically liberal voters (and may continue to do so since there are still some populists who vote for Democrats), it may be harder for Republicans to continue to push a traditional conservative free-market agenda.

As these results show, free market advocates pletely e in the Democratic Party and increasingly ing a minority within the GOP. If we don’t find a way to shift the tide soon we advocates of economic freedom may find ourselves caught between Populist and Liberals as they fight about what sort of socialism we’ll be forced to accept.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
BREAKING NEWS: Crow’s toilet paper proposal flushed
An entire nation breathes a sigh of relief today, as Sheryl Crow has claimed that her proposal to restrict toilet paper usage to one square per restroom visit was a joke, as this blogger suspected. Unfortunately, Crow had no ment on the status of her “dining sleeve” device. You can count on the PowerBlog to bring you the latest news and updates on this important story as they occur. More: Iain Murray at Planet Gore notes that all things considered,...
Banking: Latin America’s Achilles heel
Despite strong overall growth, a number of internal problems, including excessive regulation, continue to limit wealth creation throughout Latin America, reports Samuel Gregg. The regulations Dr. Gregg examines include those on starting a business and on banking. Dr. Gregg explains that while it takes as few as 5 days to file the appropriate paper work to start a business in the United States, it takes an average of 152 days in Brazil. Dr. Gregg states that there are fewer loopholes...
The corporate milk wars
Biotech giant Monsanto has added its considerable influence to the push to restrict or ban labeling of dairy products as free from added rBST, a monly used to induce cows to produce more milk. Christopher Wanjek, a columnist at , reports that Monsanto thinks that such advertising practice “scares consumers into thinking there’s something unhealthy about its human-made binant bovine growth hormone.” As I related earlier this year, Julianne Malveaux headlined a similar campaign against such labeling. The claim is...
Black unemployment drop
Jerry Bowyer at NRO highlights a remarkable statistic with this “BuzzChart”: The unemployment rate among black Americans has fallen 2.7 percentage points since April 2003 (the e from the National Urban League’s annual “State of Black America” report). Bowyer chalks it up to Bush’s tax cuts. I’ve no doubt the tax cuts have had a positive impact on the national economy, but I’m not sure that the drop can be simply tied to that cause. Overall unemployment, for example, has...
Archbishop resigns board over Sheryl Crow
Tim Townsend, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reports: ST. LOUIS — Rock singer Sheryl Crow ing home to Missouri this weekend to sing her polished, roots-rock songs at the Fox Theater to help raise money for children with cancer. But St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke was not interested in Crow’s altruism. He was interested in her activism — specifically her support for embryonic stem cell research, which the Roman Catholic church believes is akin to abortion. On Wednesday, Burke said...
Malaria awareness day
Today is Malaria Awareness Day. Today’s edition of Zondervan>To the Point has a plethora of related links (look under “Extra Points”). Be sure to also check out Acton’s award-winning ad campaign, which focuses in part on impacting malaria. ...
We’re doomed. Just accept it.
Whoever wrote this deserves an award for managing to keep all of the various threads together. It’s almost a perfect storm of public policy ineptitude: Just in case you lost track of the bouncing ball, here it is: Virginia has finally put the crisis-ignoring haters of truth in their place by passing a roads package to encourage the use of cars that are destroying the planet, so people can reach their sprawling subdivisions that Virginia is trying to keep in...
Virginia Tech shooting reveals America’s new ‘At Risk’ group
Anthony Bradley looks at America’s children of privilege and the influences that have put so many of them into crisis. “There is mounting evidence that we are faced with a new reality in America: educated, middle-class kids represent a new ‘at risk’ group, as both perpetrators and victims of peer-related violence,” Bradley writes. Read the rest of mentary here. ...
Stepping up
Grand Rapids seems to be establishing a precedent for private corporations and individuals stepping up to the plate in the face of budget cuts and financial difficulty. The most recent example is the announcement that all six city pools will be open this summer, rather than just three. That means that the Director of Parks and Recreation is now looking to fill 160 new jobs (including lifeguards and water safety instructors) to man the parks. Why, when Michigan is facing...
Global Warming Consensus Watch, Volume II
This week in the PowerBlog’s Global Warming Consensus Watch: A final pass at the Sheryl Crow/Toilet Paper controversy, just to ensure that the issue is wiped clean; The fight against climate change goes to 11; Global warming causes everything, and we’ve got professional athletes to prove it; and finally, what – if anything – are those carbon offsets offsetting? Flushing away the residue of a botched joke: As I noted earlier, Sheryl Crow has decided to inform the rest of...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved