Poll: Most say they're conservative

Conservatives outnumbered moderates and liberals across the United States in 2009, Gallup results released Thursday indicated.

Forty-percent of people surveyed identified themselves as conservatives, compared to 36 percent saying they were moderates and 21 percent indicating they were liberal, results showed.
Reviewing data from the decade ending in 2009, Gallup said its annual political ideology trends documented a dip in the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as moderates -- from 40 percent in 2000 to 36 percent in 2009 -- while self-proclaimed liberals and conservatives expanded slightly.

During that same period, the proportion of independents identifying themselves "moderate" stayed in the mid-40 percent range during the last decade, while the proportion of Republican and Democratic moderates fell, the Princeton, N.J., polling agency reported.

Gallup attributed the 3 percentage point increase between 2008 and 2009 in the number of Americans calling themselves conservative to an increase in the percentage of political independents adopting that label.

Results are based on aggregated data from Gallup polls in 2009, each based on nationwide telephone interviews with at least 1,000 adults. For results based on the total sample of 21,905 adults, the margin of error was 1 percentage point.