Study: "Center-Right Nation" Narrative Spiked Immediately After Election Day

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When I wrote my first column about the "center-right nation" [2] and subsequently launched the "Center-Right Nation Watch" series on this blog I predicted that the news media would actually increase its usage of this term after Obama won. I did a Lexis-Nexis search of the term, and was the first to note the trend and make the prediction that "if Obama wins, expect more frantic talk from the fringe about how electing a black man billed as an Islamic Karl Marx obviously means our country is more conservative than ever."

Feeling like I was out on a limb (and remember, this was almost 2 weeks before a group of major progressive pundits [3] belatedly started writing about the trend), I asked a friend out here in Denver who works with a company called Trendrr to officially track whether my prediction was right - and you can see from the results above, it was - more so than I ever expected.

As the graph shows [1], the use of the exact term "center-right nation" spiked immediately after election day (point "0" is the day my column published, point "1" is election day). You can use this link to track the growth of the "center-right nation" term in real-time [1].

While it's true - this trend study doesn't tell us how many of the "center-right nation" references are saying this is "not a center-right nation." But a look through Lexis-Nexis shows it's safe to assume that the vast majority of these references are asserting this is a "center-right nation." Indeed, you can watch ThinkProgress's video highlight reel [4] of conservative pundits and reporters insisting that despite the huge Democratic landslide and overwhelming public opinion data to the contrary, America remains a "center-right nation":

So we're not talking about theory anymore - we're talking about empirical fact. The media has exponentially increased the amount of times it claims that this country is a "center-right nation" - at the very same time public opinion data [5] shows the country is a decidedly center-left nation. In short, we have the two hard data points proving that as the country has become more progressive and validated its progressivism on election day, the media has increased its claims that the nation is conservative.