Gallup just released a poll that reports this:
Despite the results of the 2008 presidential election, Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal, 39% to 18%, with 42% saying they have not changed. While independents and Democrats most often say their views haven’t changed, more members of all three major partisan groups indicate that their views have shifted to the right rather than to the left.
This is part of a broader movement we’re seeing since Obama was elected president. The country, by about a two-to-one margin, sees itself moving more toward conservatism than liberalism. And even in the Age of Obama, the tide seems to be with rather than against conservatism. If an ideological realignment is going on, it seems to be somewhat in the opposite direction of what Obama and his supporters had hoped for.
It’s much too early to make any definative judgments about things at this point; the significance of Obamaism to American conservatism depends on what happens once the effects of his actions hit shore. But I think it’s fair to say that at this point, the public’s wariness about the course the president has set us on is growing and resistance to his policies is increasing. Much of the public believes Obama is more liberal than advertised, more liberal than they thought, and more liberal than they are comfortable with. That hasn’t translated into a full-scale revolt by any means. But we are seeing concrete evidence that Obama’s governance is ideologically at odds with where the nation is. Unless he is able to produce tangible results fairly soon, these data points may well metastasize into forceful, and perhaps even fierce, political opposition.
We’re still in the early months of Obama’s presidency. He remains a personally popular president, and his job-approval ratings remain fairly strong. But winds that were at his back are now shifting, and may soon be in his face. Over the coming months, those headwinds will, I think, get stronger and stiffer, and it will happen sooner than he and his team ever imagined.
