MORE ON THE 40% MYTH

Conservatives love to crow about a Gallup poll in which 40% of Americans identified themselves as Conservative.  I've noted before that this number greatly overestimates the number of real (i.e. talk radio) conservatives in America and the results of the special election in NY's 26th Congressional Districy bear out this. This is from the AP:

These are the results from 2010:

Now, what happened between Fall 2010 and May 2011? One, we learned that the GOP wants to destroy Medicare, something that wasn't know in the Fall. Two, we learned that the House GOP was more interested in defunding NPR than in creating jobs. As a result, the GOP candidate lost over 30 percentage points.