Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
The new political divide pits conservatives against liberals and populists
The new political divide pits conservatives against liberals and populists
May 14, 2025 3:10 AM

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
Burden Bearing and Biblically Based Healthcare
Over the past year, public discussion about the Affordable Care Act has led many Christians to question the proper roles of government and business in providing healthcare. Too often, though, the question left unexamined is what role the church should have in responding to the medical needs of munity. Throughout the history of the church, Christians have been actively involved in the provision and funding of health and medical resources. But for the past 50 years, these functions have been...
‘This Conversation Doesn’t Apply To You:’ Obamacare Underwhelms Again
CBS This Morning’s Charlie Rose and Sharyl Attkinsson report that a woman who once touted the Affordable Care Act as “NancyCare” is now forced to drop insurance for her eight employees, and let them fend for themselves on HealthCare.gov. It isn’t going well. In the report, White House spokesman Jay Carney tells reporters that, “This conversation doesn’t apply to you” when asked how the Affordable Care Act will affect small business owners like Nancy Clark. As Charlie Rose says, “Another...
How to Help the Working Poor on Thanksgiving
Want to help the working poor this Christmas season? Nicole Gelinas has a free-market suggestion: Don’t shop on Thanksgiving. More than half a decade on, we’re still missing 976,000 jobs — and we’re missing 12 million jobs if you figure that jobs should grow as the population grows. But it’s one thing to be economically afraid. It’s another to be cut off from fully celebrating America’s all-race, all-religion family holiday because you and your fellow Americans are fearful economically. That’s...
Supreme Court to Decide Obamacare Contraceptive-Abortifacient Mandate
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a pair of cases that challenge the HHS mandate requiring many panies to insure contraceptive and abortifacients. The Obama administration asked the high court to review the issue after a federal appeals court in Colorado found in favor of Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma-based crafts franchise. The court bine the Hobby Lobby case with lesser-known case involving Conestoga, a pany that lost earlier bids for relief from the mandate. If you haven’t been following...
Imagination And Virtue
Anne got her best friend, Diana, drunk. Sick-drunk. Neither was old enough to drink, and Anne didn’t really mean to, but…there it was. Diana’s mother was horrified, and forbade the friendship to go on. Anne was crushed. She really had made a mistake: what she thought was a cordial was wine. It was a hard lesson. If you ever read Anne of Green Gables, you know this story. Things get set aright – partly by the adults, and partly by...
Noah-Adam: First Part of Kuyper’s ‘Common Grace’ Now Available
Christian’s Library Press has released the first in itsseries of English translations of Abraham Kuyper’s most famous work, Common Grace, a three-volume work of practical public theology. This release, Noah-Adam, is the first of three parts in Volume 1: The Historical Section. Common Grace (De gemeene gratie) was originally published in 1901-1905 while Kuyper was prime minister. This new translation is for modern Christians who want to know more about their proper role in public life and the vastness of...
Hope Is a Burning Thing
Tomorrow I’ll be offering up a more mentary on the second movie of the Hunger Games trilogy, “Catching Fire.” Until then, you can read Dylan Pahman’s engagement on the theme of tyranny, as well as that of Alissa Wilkinson over at CT. I’ll be critiquing Wilkinson’s perspective in my own review tomorrow. I think her analysis starts off strong, but she ends up getting distracted by, well, the distractions. But mend her piece to your review, and in the meantime...
‘Catching Fire’ and the Call to Freedom
Last weekend the second film based on the immensely popular Hunger Games series of books, Catching Fire, opened in theaters. One interesting way to view the world of Panem, Suzanne Collins’ totalitarian society that serves as the setting for the drama, is as a synthesis of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In Catching Fire, Collins suggests that whether a tyranny exercises its dominion through pleasure or oppression, under the right circumstances conscience will inevitably spur some...
Calvin Coolidge and a Thanksgiving of Abundance
My pastor made a good point in his sermon Sunday that the more secular we e as a nation the less we talk about “abundance.” Instead, the national dialogue of our politics shift to discussions about scarcity. Many politicians are stuck in the mindset of talking about things like wealth distribution and rationing. The more materialist and less spiritual we e as a nation, the more inclined we are to fight over the table scraps. If we don’t look to...
The End of Urban Ministry
Derick Scudder, senior pastor at Bethel Chapel Church, an evangelical congregation in the northern part of Philadelphia, pleted a 4-part series explaining why he is “done with urban ministry.” Bethel Chapel is a “Bible-teaching church focused on the Good News that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. We are a racially diverse, multi-generational group of people who want to know Jesus better.” As a pastor of a church deeply embedded in a challenging section of Philadelphia, Scudder has...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved