The GOP and ideology: Can’t win elections without moderates

So, Pollster.com , from Survey USA, has some interesting data about the Libby Sentence Commutation. I am not actually interested at all in writing about the results of the poll regarding Libby. (although it was fascinating how disconnected conservative voters are from the conservative chattering classes) I’ve presented the partisan and ideological alignment in the chart below The size of each box is proportional to the percentage of the population.

Republican

Independent

Democrat

Conservative

Moderate

Liberal

I am interested in the connection between party and ideology that we get from the underlying data. Some observations:

• The GOP and conservatives are, basically, the same with Republicans being 30% and conservatives are 29%
• Liberals are, however, only half the self-identifying Democrats with self-IDing Dems being 40%, while liberals only 19%
• In other words, 50% or so of self-identified moderates feel comfortable identifying as Democrats.
• In other words, almost no moderates are identifying as Republicans.

The GOP is not appealing to moderates at this moment while half of self-identified Democrats are moderates. That should scare us.

Now, some caveats. These labels describe self-identification quite a long ways from an election and are a reaction to Bush. Once the frame shifts so that Bush will, hopefully, not define Republicans.

But still. This is bad