In the late nineteen-sixties, when Richard Nixon was practicing law on Wall Street but had his eye on bigger things, the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported that Nixon’s advisers were studying a new book titled “The Political Beliefs of Americans,” with particular interest in its use of opinion polls to explain the nature and depth of conservatism in America. …
What most interested Nixon strategists, who were looking for ways to win by recovering the American center, was the idea that the electorate could be viewed along what Free and Cantril labelled the “ideological spectrum” and the “operational spectrum.” CONT.
Jeffrey Frank, The New Yorker