Democrats Move Left

Fred Barnes reports via The Weekly Standard on a leftward drift among Democrats. See what he writes:

That Democrats have grown more liberal has been quantified by both Gallup and Pew Research. In January, Gallup found that 43 percent of Democrats identify themselves as liberals, up from 29 percent in 2000. Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones called the shift “a telling indicator” of a once-diverse party “increasingly dominated by those from the left end of the ideological spectrum.”

In February, pollster Andrew Kohut wrote that Pew’s “values survey” from 1987 to 2012 shows Democrats “as a whole have moved to the left in recent years. They are much more socially liberal than they were even a decade ago, more supportive of activist government, more in favor of increased regulation of business.”

In June, another Pew survey found that since 1994 the share of Democrats who regard themselves as usually liberal had jumped from 30 percent to 56 percent. And 70 percent of active Democrats said their views are mostly or always liberal, double the 35 percent of two decades ago.

This liberal trend is unhelpful.