{"id":61639,"date":"2017-01-04T06:00:12","date_gmt":"2017-01-04T12:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=61639"},"modified":"2017-01-03T13:38:14","modified_gmt":"2017-01-03T19:38:14","slug":"to-the-extreme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=61639","title":{"rendered":"To The Extreme"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Gallup reports the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as politically conservative is the highest it&#8217;s been in twenty years.<\/p>\n<p>Which doesn&#8217;t surprise me much; while Americans may have any number of political orientations, real life\u00a0<em>is\u00a0<\/em>conservative for most Americans.<\/p>\n<p>But the real takeaway? \u00a0Those describing themselves as Democrats <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gallup.com\/poll\/201152\/conservative-liberal-gap-continues-narrow-tuesday.aspx\">are becoming more extreme toward the left<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Most of the long-term change in Americans&#8217; political views occurred after 2000 and can be explained by one overarching factor &#8212; an increasing likelihood of Democrats (including independents who lean Democratic) to self-identify as liberal. Democratic liberal identification has increased by about one percentage point each year, from 30% in 2001 to 44% in 2016. As a result, liberalism now ranks as the top ideological group among Democrats.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, there has been an eight-point decline since 2001 in the percentage of Democrats identifying as conservative and a six-point decline in the percentage of Democrats who are moderate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>My two cents? \u00a0That&#8217;s good news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gallup reports the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as politically conservative is the highest it&#8217;s been in twenty years. Which doesn&#8217;t surprise me much; while Americans may have any number of political orientations, real life\u00a0is\u00a0conservative for most Americans. But the real takeaway? \u00a0Those describing themselves as Democrats are becoming more extreme toward the left: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism","category-democrats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61639"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61640,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61639\/revisions\/61640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}