Report Summary

Reflecting a dramatically changed environment in America and the world, the voter typology which Times Mirror created in 1987 has been modified to make it more responsive to the new values and attitudes that affect voter behavior in 1994. We present it as “The People, The Press and Politics: The New Political Landscape.”

Highlights of our findings are given in an Overview, followed by descriptions of the key building blocks of the new typology. The values and attitudes of the electorate are detailed in Section 1, and the trends in party identification and party attitudes in Section 2.

The new political typology, based on these values and political self-identification, is then presented in Section 3, including descriptions of nine different categories of voters dispersed across the right, center, and left of the political spectrum.

Viewed through the prism of the new typology, the consequences of the new political landscape are discussed in Section 4: priorities of the electorate; policy issues; voter intentions and judgments, including trial heats of possible presidential races; and public attitudes toward institutions, including the media, as well as organizations and movements.

A final section details the methodology by which we arrived at the typology. Addenda consist of the top-line results of the surveys and the questionnaires used in the polling. Project participants included Larry Hugick as survey analyst; Robert C. Toth, editor; Carol Bowman, research director, Carolyn Miller, survey statistician, and Kim Parker, assistant research director.