I've been poring through the 2008 GSS Results running through query after query (the query engine is awesome and super fast) and here's a few choice graphs:
So this one asks people to rate their views on health care between 1 and 5, with 1 being "government should help" with the costs, and 5 being "people should help themselves" (YOYO).
I went with a line graph because it's easier to see how the values change over time, but note that I excluded the data between 1994 and 2000 just to keep the chart readable (run it yourselves using "year" and "helpsick" as the variables if you don't trust me).
What's interesting is that in 1993, the 1's and 2's were 53% and in 2008, they are 54%. However in 2008, 35% are 1's versus 29% in 1993. The overall support for government paying for health care is equal, but the base is much more solid. In fact, "1" on this question is now the plurality view, and is the highest it has been since 1975. Looking at the trends, what has been happening is that the 2's and 3's have been migrating to 1's.
A good amount of attention has been paid to the ever larger party affiliation gap that Democrats are enjoying this year. Unfortunately there is not nearly so much attention paid to the underlying ideological alignment of voters (not much polling on it either). It is these beliefs that largely impact how elected officials behave with respect to policy, and particularly so for the Democratic party which still has a substantial conservative wing unlike the decimated ranks of the extinct or endangered liberal Republicans.
One thing I want to see the left doing more effectively is laying the blame for the disasterous policies of the Bush Administration and Republican congresses on the ideology that crafted them, namely conservativism. John McCain is still demonizing "failed" liberal ideas from the 70s and trying to raise the spectre of a second term for Jimmy Carter (a really weak and self-dating attack). Yet Democrats do not routinely link the failures of Iraq, Katrina and the Economy on the ideology that dreams up all these great ideas like invading unrelated countries after being attacked or handing a large state's energy system over to a bunch of unaccountable sociopaths happy to screw up the grid so prices will increase.
Despite the relative lack of effort in this area outside of blogs, I'm happy to report that some people are figuring it out, and the lead conservativism has on liberalism is the smallest is has been in decades (I went back as far as 1984):
