Thanks titey! I was just about to post the exact same qualitative analysis by just looking at the plots, and then saw you confirmed it quantitatively!
Not only do the trends/slopes tell a disturbing story, the 0.168 correlation for "conservatives" shows none of the conviction month-to-month indicative of a true, principled conservative.
To me, this says the "conservative" label is being interpreted differently today from Kirk/Burke/Buckley.
So now the obvious question is: "What are we to do about it?"
My answer would be two-fold: education and consolidation.
Conservatives need to make the real effort to get out and educate their fellow citizens, rather than just propagandise them. We need to focus on (re)teaching Americans the philosophy of our Founders, and the underlying basis upon which it was built. We need to teach our fellow Americans how to think and apply those philosophies to today's issues. We need to get off of simply mouthing bumper sticker slogans and our focus on theatrical sideline issues like "Obama's birth certificate" and so forth. Deal with real issues that are solid, not theatrics that rely upon conspiracy theory and innuendo.
Likewise, we need to consolidate. Psychologically, people respond to leadership. That's a proven fact. When conservatives dither around and fight each other, multiplying themselves into two dozen little pissant third parties and so forth, we present an image to the rest of the country - you know, all the non-FReepers out there, the people who aren't politically astute or active, but whose votes count for as much as ours - that we don't know what we're on about, that we're just a bunch of squawking losers who can't even get it together to put forward what we believe.
Splitterism undermines our ideological credibility. If we all got on the ball - and this most logically will take place when conservatives organise to take over the GOP and kick the RINOs out, something that could happen in as little as two years, if we were serious about it - we would make converts to our cause and would be much more likely to triumph.
The time to fool around with bumper sticker slogans and third-party ego trips is NOT now. Do that junk when we have the leisure to not be serious about preserving what's left of this country. Until then, knock it off!