Pew's Political Typology

Pew Research Center has issued a report that sorts American voters into homogeneous groups according to their values, political beliefs and party affiliation. The report is based on a two-part survey of 2,000 Americans interviewed in December 2004, most of whom were re-contacted to follow up on current political issues in March 2005.

The Pew report Beyond Red vs. Blue finds Republicans are divided about the role of government and Democrats by social and personal values. Patrick Ruffini is Blogging the Pew Report, providing his initial impressions and promising more analysis in the coming days. We would suggest readers take the Pew results with a large gain of salt and a read of Ruffini’s posts on the subject.

Pew ends up dividing the nation into nine groups; three Right, three Political Middle and three Left as shown below. If you’re interested in learning your Political Typology according to Pew, click here and take their survey.

Percent Of Electorate By Typology

The Right
Enterprisers - 11% of the electorate
Social Conservatives - 13% of the electorate
Pro-Government Conservatives - 10% of the electorate

The Political Middle
Upbeats - 11% of the electorate
Disaffecteds - 9% of the electorate
Bystanders (nonvoters) - 10% of the general public

The Left
Liberals - 19% of the electorate
Disadvantaged Democrats - 10% of the electorate
Conservative Democrats - 14% of the electorate

Based upon the survey results, Enlighten-NewJersey bloggers all came out as Enterprisers. The “non-partisan” Pew Research Center describes Enterprisers as an extremely partisan Republican group. In contrast, Liberals are described as now comprising the largest share of Democrats.

It’s not all bad being an Enterpriser though, Pew notes Enterprisers follow news about government and politics more closely than any other group, and exhibit the most knowledge about world affairs. Liberals are second only to Enterprisers in following news about government and public affairs. Now if we could only get the other groups to pay more attention, they’d all be Enterprisers.

It’s not going to be easy when the “non-partisan” Pew Research Center is posting this news:

Laura Bush's Mission Accomplished - A Pew Research Center poll shows that Americans now trust the press less than every other major institution.

Conservatives & 'South Park' - Conservatives can't stop whining about Hollywood, but the embarrassing reality is that they want to be hip, too.

It's not easy.Interesting choice of news for a non-partisan group, wouldn’t you say?