I tried to do a poll once and never figured it out…plus I’d do a very poor job of coming up with the classifications.
How about we come up with a fair listing of types on the political spectrum and then a poll so that we can see where SDMB members put themselves. An open poll so we can see the user names.
To start the discussion I think the extremist of the right are the evangelicals, followed by the your basic conservative and then the fiscal conservatives.
As for the left, the most extreme would be those that …hmmm. See, I said I’d be bad at it.
It seems to be left, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of Dopers are moderates. Anyone really trying to learn quickly finds out how complicated simple questions can be, and only fools are certain.
That said, the noisiest here tend to be on the extremes and they are more likely to answer the questions of any pole.
And the same is true of urban residents generally. Remember that the Dope got its start as (and still is) a column in alternative free weekly tabloids, the sort that you’ll mainly find in cities and college towns. See this “red and blue” map of America broken down by county, and shaded from red to purple to blue according to local voting behavior. The political-cultural divide is not between North and South, or East and West, or Coasts and Flyover; it is, everywhere, between the city and the countryside.
I’ve heard time and time again polling always skews in favor of the left, until of course the actual results come in showing a much stronger showing from the right.
My own view is we are center right in the structure of our daily lives but when it comes to policies people are now tending to be more tolerant, forgiving, and a little liberal as long as they dont think it’s affecting them in any significant negative way. My bozoputer has failed to spit out a political label for this.
It’s a pretty big change in a short time if you look back not long ago to the moral majority’s heyday.
I wanted to add that I’ve been reading the all the forum categories here for a few months now, it’s not easy to speculate specific posters voting preference based on their posts in GQ and the GD forums. (It takes a little gander at the BBQ really to see that emotions give a better indicator to that, than say views on general policies and history)
Well, I started by saying that I don’t think I’d do a very good job on my own, but I’m willing to give it a shot.
On the right I think a distinction should be made for…
Evangelicals
conservatives who aren’t particularly religious but are both fiscally and socially so,
fiscal conservatives
and fiscal conservatives who are actually relatively liberal on social issues (Libertarians?).
On the left I think you have …
the true Occupiers who believe that society should take care of them,
those who aren’t quite so left but still believe that wealth should be actively reditributed until things are fair,
succesful liberals who believe some of the same things but in a significant part because of their personal consciences and
the hard working union types
