A remarkably steady split — with a late liberal stirring

Share of Americans identifying as liberal, moderate, or conservative (GSS polviews, collapsed to three), by survey year.

Takeaway: moderates lead throughout; conservatives keep a steady few-point edge over liberals for half a century. The only durable shift is the recent rise of the liberal share, from about 28 to 29 percent.

Liberal = polviews 1–3, moderate = 4, conservative = 5–7. Weighted by weight_use; 65,878 respondents across 33 survey years. The 2021 GSS shifted to web/push-to-web fielding (dashed marker); read the last two points with that break in mind. Source: General Social Survey, 1974–2024.

Who is conservative — and how that changed

Mean self-placement on the 1 (liberal) to 7 (conservative) scale, by group, across seven period bins. 4 is exactly moderate. Choose a demographic lens.

Lines are colored by where each group sits: blue below the moderate line of 4, red above it. Cells with effective N below 100 are dropped, so some lines start later. Weighted by weight_use. Income is omitted here and shown in the next figure. Source: General Social Survey, 1974–2024.

What sorts self-identification — religion first, income last

Weighted share of variance (η²) in self-placement explained by each factor, pooled 2006–2024.

Takeaway: religious attendance explains roughly 0.059 of the variation in how Americans label themselves — several times any other factor, and some sixty times income's 0.001.

η² is the weighted between-group share of polviews variance; income is within-year weighted terciles. Descriptive, not a causal decomposition, and the factors overlap (the religious are also disproportionately Southern and less-degreed). Weighted by weight_use, pooled 2006–2024. Source: General Social Survey.