PEW SURVEY ON VOTERS

There's some good news here about the political future of Liberals:

Survey of Voters Maps Subtle Splits
By Janet Hook LA Times Staff Writer

http://news.yahoo.com/s/latimests/20050511/ts_latimes/surveyofvotersmapssubtlesplits

The national survey released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that Republicans had gained, in part, by winning increased support from the middle of the political spectrum — a part of the electorate less inclined toward the GOP in 1999, the last time the center conducted such a broad study.

Asked whether they would like to have Bush run for a third term if that was not prohibited by the Constitution, 27% said yes. By contrast, 43% said they would like Bill Clinton to serve a third term in the White House.

The new survey, the first since Bush was elected to the White House, was based on 2,000 interviews in December. It has a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points. The survey also reflected the results of 1,090 follow-up interviews in March, with a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

Based on both sets of interviews, the report identifies eight distinct political types: three kinds of conservatives that favor the GOP, three mostly liberal groups that favor Democrats, and two groups in the middle.

One faction of swing voters includes well-educated, politically engaged moderates; although most are independent, they voted for Bush by a 4-to-1 margin last fall. The other swing group is made up of less-educated and lower-income people who are disaffected with politics. Many of them did not vote in 2004, but among those who did, more than twice as many voted for Bush as for Sen. John F. Kerry (news, bio, voting record), the Democratic presidential nominee.

The poll found that these swing voters, although diverse, had in common "a highly favorable opinion of President Bush personally and support for an aggressive military stance against potential enemies."

That support from the political center was crucial to the GOP because the study found that the three Republican-leaning groups it identified accounted for 29% of the public, while the three Democratic groups, taken together, constituted 41%.