So I was in my office today when my advisor came in to chat and I mentioned that I started a blog, which got us talking about yourmorals.org. I was showing him some of the political graphs when he noticed an interesting thing about our political candidates survey (built by Sena Koleva, btw). Specifically, he noticed that conservatives rated republican candidates lower than liberals rated democratic candidates. The graphs are below and you can see that the average liberal ratings of democrats are around 5 (blue bars), while none of the conservative ratings of republicans have an average rating close to 5 (red bars - Thompson comes closest at 4.6).

….interesting, eh? Good news for liberals? not so fast…yourmorals.org is clearly not a representative sample of the population as we’ve gotten a lot of subjects from liberal blogs, liberal new york times readers, etc…So our ‘conservatives’ are likely to be more liberal than most samples of conservatives.

Still, there is a way to test this theory better and that is to look at the results for people who described themselves as ‘very conservative’. The results are below.

Now I think the democrats can take a bit of solace in this as while self described ‘very conservative’ subjects do rate republican candidates higher, they still rate republican candidates lower than the average liberal rates democratic candidates. So unless even our ‘very conservative’ subjects are less conservative than average (I doubt it), it seems like this is evidence that republicans really aren’t as happy with their choices for 2008.

Still, there is plenty of time for democrats to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.

You can read more about republican dissatisfaction here.