Fiscally Conservative, Socially Liberal Virginians
The Washington Post just did a major poll of Virginians and tantalizingly included this note in writing up the results:
In contrast to four years ago, about as many Virginians consider themselves to be liberal on social matters as call themselves conservative. Fiscal conservatism is on the rise, but on these social issues, it’s liberalism that’s ticked higher.
But those questions were not included in the published data. Thanks to the generosity of Post polling director Jon Cohen, I can report that the percentage of Virginians who said they were socially liberal or moderate and fiscally conservative went from 16 in 2007 to 23 in the latest poll. This reflects a small increase in the number of social liberals and a larger increase in the number of fiscal conservatives. And here are the tables on those questions:
We’ve written about fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters before, notably here and here, and in relation to Virginia and in the Republican party. Apparently when you ask people, “Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal?”, you get a higher percentage than when you ask the questions separately, as the Post did. When the Zogby Poll asked that question to actual voters in 2006, fully 59 percent said yes. Broader background on the “libertarian vote” here.
More Data on “Fiscally Conservative, Socially Liberal” Voters
A study by the Tarrance Group for the Republican organization GOPAC provides further evidence on the existence of voters who don’t fall into the “conservative” or “liberal” box. Tarrance asked people who voted in the 2008 election not just to label themselves conservative or liberal, but to describe their views on both fiscal and social issues. The questions were:
When thinking about fiscal issues, like taxes and government spending, do you consider yourself to be:
Very conservative, Somewhat conservative, Somewhat liberal, or Very liberal?When thinking about social issues, like abortion and gay marriage, do you consider yourself to be:
Very conservative, Somewhat conservative, Somewhat liberal, or Very liberal?
Tarrance leaves out the “moderate” option, but a few respondents volunteer it.
The results were interesting. While 69 percent of respondents described themselves as conservatives on fiscal issues, only 53 percent said they were conservative on social issues. When you combine the responses, you find that 23 percent of respondents described themselves as fiscally conservative but liberal or moderate on social issues. That’s pretty close to the estimates of the libertarian vote that David Kirby and I presented in “The Libertarian Vote in the Age of Obama.” See pages 4-7, especially Figure 3, in the full study. Using fairly strict criteria, we declared 14 percent of the electorate to fall into the libertarian category. But three other studies yielded 23 to 26 percent who gave libertarian answers to questions about both fiscal and social issues.
Tarrance presented the results to GOPAC this way (the “moderate” category includes both those who volunteered the word moderate and those who declined to pick either liberal or conservative as a label):
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