Gallup Names the Four Most Conservative States

Mississippi and Wyoming among the most right-wing states in the nation, Gallup finds.

Forget about the Bloods and the Crips. Over the past dozen years, it’s mattered less what color one wears and more what color state one lives in—red or blue, Republican or Democrat. There was such beef between red states and blue states in 2004 that a then unknown candidate for Senate named Barack Obama made a plea for unity when he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention that year.

“The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats,” he said. “But I’ve got news for them…We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

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Little did Obama know that years after delivering the speech that put him on the national stage, tensions between red states and blue states would continue to simmer, with conservatives hell bent on stopping him from being reelected president. But four states are among those most likely not to cast a ballot for Obama on Election Day: Mississippi, Utah, Wyoming, and Alabama. These states share the distinction of being the most conservative in the union, according to Gallup data collected last year from a sample of 218, 537 adults. They’re the only states where at least 50 percent of residents identify as conservative. Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Idaho and Tennessee rounded out Gallup’s list of the Top 10 most conservative U.S. states. On the flipside, the most liberal states in the union include the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, New York, Hawaii, California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Connecticut.

While the majority of residents in the Top 4 most conservative U.S. states identify as right-wingers, the most liberal states are not made up of a mostly left-leaning population. In the two most liberal places in the U.S.—Washington D.C. and Massachusetts—39.8 and 30.3 percent of the population, respectively, identify as lefties. This reflects Gallup’s finding that just 21 percent of all Americans identify as liberal, while a whopping 40 percent of Americans identify as conservative and 36 percent identify as moderate. As Gallup puts it:

“America remains a conservative nation, at least as measured by the ideological labels Americans choose to use to identify themselves. …The general distribution of ideology across the states follows traditional red-blue distinctions, with liberals most highly represented on the East and West Coasts, while conservatives dominate in Southern, Midwestern, and Western states.”

Of course, it’s long been known that the so-called “flyover states” lean conservative, but it’s not necessarily common knowledge that the nation as a whole falls to the right. If that means Fox News actually does represent the views of mainstream America, boy has Obama got his work cut out for him.