The latest Battleground Poll reaffirms what I wrote in my American Thinker article eleven years ago: Americans are conservative.  Virtually every single national poll in the last fifty years tells the same tale.  Every one of those polls shows a conservative advantage over liberals in America as a whole.  The  Gallup Poll reported in national polls a 35-to-26%  conservative advantage nationally. 

The conservative advantage among the 50 states remains strong.  The Gallup Poll published earlier this year showed that conservatives outnumber liberals in 39 of the fifty states, with only 9 states having a liberal plurality.

Survey USA uses state polling by news media in those states, which shows surprising data.  Minnesota, for example, which is almost the definition of a liberal state in Flyover Country, has a ten-point conservative advantage over liberals.  In a statewide poll in late 2017, conservatives had a nine-point advantage over liberals. 

California, the quintessential leftist state, has in one recent poll a 29-to-25% conservative advantage.  A poll in October 2017 had a liberal advantage of 33% to 28% conservative, and a September 2017 statewide poll showed liberals with a statistically insignificant 30-to-28% advantage.

What is surprising about these data is the fact that almost invariably, the polling organization that produces the findings downplays the conservative advantage and focuses on the broad summary of the polls, including any gains by liberals.  Gallup is notorious for this.  My September 2014 article, "Gallup, Battleground, and Conservatism" shows just how far Gallup was willing to go to hide the remarkable findings in its own polling research in poll after poll that showed huge conservative advantages. 

In my February 2014 article, I noted that Gallup poll data showed that more New Yorkers called themselves "conservative" than "liberal."  Surely, that is real news, information that almost no one would have guessed if he did not burrow into the data of the Gallup poll to find that fact, and surely, that sort of newsworthy data is something Gallup ought to be proud to have discovered.  But no. 

This polling data was not an anomaly.  Every state-by-state Gallup poll from 2009 to 2014 showed New York with a conservative plurality over liberals.  Other news organizations in New York showed that conservatives either tied liberals in the state or that conservatives had a small advantage over liberals in New York.  Big news?  Sure!  But big news totally ignored by news media.

I also pointed out in my April 2015 article that the self-identification of Americans as "liberal" or "conservative" actually understates the attraction of conservatism in America.  In that article, I note that Americans who call themselves "pro-choice" on abortion actually are closer to "pro-life" when asked about the conditions under which abortion should be allowed.  The left has falsely presented to Americans what "pro-life" and "pro-choice" mean. 

Twenty-seven percent of Americans, according to a CNN poll then, favored abortion on demand, and 13% of Americans felt that abortion is morally acceptable.  A Quinnipiac poll about the same time showed that 60% of Americans opposed abortion except in cases of rape and incest.  Yet what do polling numbers show when Americans are asked if they are "pro-life" or "pro-choice"?  The nation is, notionally, evenly divided, but in fact, the overwhelming majority of Americans are actually much closer to the pro-life end of the spectrum. 

My May 2014 article shows that although the overwhelming majority of Americans actually disagree with what Roe v. Wade rules about abortion, the left's job of making us as ignorant as possible has reduced the knowledge of Americans so much that the same Gallup poll showed that by 53% to 29%, Americans opposed overturning Roe v. Wade.  CNN and CBS polls, as I note in that article, showed the same weird split between the overwhelming majority of Americans who opposed what Roe v. Wade did to constitutional law with the same polling population overwhelmingly opposed overturning Roe v. Wade.

Americans are abused sheep to the leftist establishment.  That is why the real battle in America is not over politics, but rather over who controls the conveyor belts of public schools, colleges, media, polling organizations, non-profit giants, and all those other tools of cerebral enslavement Orwell so well defined in 1984.  The cause is not hopeless in America, as the persistent response of Americans to polls proves.  In spite of all the defamation and slanders against conservatism, Americans continue to define themselves as conservative rather than liberal.  This is good – indeed, remarkable – news that we should take to heart.