Conservatives make up 40% of the active voters.
Conservatives make up 40% of the active voters.
Specify granularity. Primary/General? "Red/Blue" states?
Rush has pushed the myth we are a Conservative country, when we probably never were a third. The traditional and perhaps apocryphal ideological division at the founding was 1/3 traitor, 1/3 patriot, 1/3 retard.
33-33-33 has evolved over different eras with roughly corresponding to (D)-(R)-(I) or (L)-(C)-(I) and proposed distributions from 40-40-20 or 40-30-30 or 30-30-40. Very rough numbers because there simply are no firm data points to collect. But there is practical evidence of this, as it mathematically sets the upper bound for either party at just over 60% ( by obtaining all the Independent votes ) and the largest popular vote totals have exactly matched that hypothesis ( FDR, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan ).
When you say 40% that might indicate around 1984 at our peak thanks to Reagan, when he pulled in many crossover (D) and all the (I) and I remember these polls saying the Liberals were down to 20% and on their way out ( hardly ). This is pretty much what Rush has stuck in his mind however and it ignores what the enemy has been doing since 1965. It also ignores Reagan's own amnesty which backfilled the queue for later naturalizations.
The sad truth is we are a minority of a minority. There are more (D) than (R), and within (R) we are below 50%. Blue dogs have almost all crossed over by now so we are mostly within (R) or in some states like mine, we actually have a strong (C) in New York.
I hope you don't think that Conservatives make up 40% of ALL active voters, because that would mean that (R)epublicrat RINOs are a figment of our imaginations. Alas, conservatives probably are at the lowest level for many years, and decreasing daily thanks to demographic shift from naturalizations of replacement Americans. I would guess that in the general election the sum total of conservatives would range from a quarter to a third now, 25% to 30% likely.
As we are staggered throughout the USA, you still have to imagine the twelve battleground states on the table. Do you run the guy specifically appealing to 25% to 30% of their voters? Why would we expect anything different result on election night than last time?