The release of Gallup’s annual ideological survey means it is time to once again ponder the central mystery of American politics-why an essentially conservative (or at least center-right) nation elects so many left-wing Democrats.

That question remains pressing because Gallup’s data continues to show no significant change on the ideological front over time-self-identified conservatives still outnumber self-identified liberals nationwide by a large margin (by 14.6 percentage points this year, 15.9 last). Yet Democratic candidates have won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, averaging 49 percent of the ballots cast to 45 percent for Republicans.

We can identify some of the usual suspects for such incongruous outcomes, including the conservative bête noir of liberal media bias and the broader cultural dominance of the left (Hollywood, the publishing industry, academe, etc.) that produces a soundtrack to our daily lives. Toss in the tendency of Democrats to nominate talented and ideologically slippery candidates like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Republicans to nominate untalented and ideologically clueless opponents like Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney and we get closer to an answer.

There is also, of course, the possibility that respondents fib when responding; that, since “liberal” has become something of a dirty word in American politics (hence the switch to the more innocuous-sounding “progressive”), many liberals simply refuse to admit that they are liberals and claim the “moderate” label instead. Thus, it is conceivable that there are a lot more lefties out there than Gallup’s numbers suggest.

All of this makes sense, at least in the sense of moving us toward an over-arching explanation for how a conservative nation so often votes for leftists, but my hunch is that the more powerful answer is still to be found elsewhere; more precisely in persistent conservative ideological confusion.

Along these lines, the impression is that conservatives don’t pay as much attention to or generally care about politics as much as liberals do, and thus are far more likely to vote for liberals than liberals are to vote for conservatives by ideological “mistake.” Whereas contemporary liberalism has come to be something of a comprehensive form of personal identity, conservatism is all too often simply a reflexive reaction (or “irritable mental gesture,” in Lionel Trilling’s words) that can be too easily redirected before the ballot box.

Within this context, one can even construct something of a primitive “conservative confusion index” by matching Gallup’s state-by-state ideological breakdown with the results of the 2012 presidential election. More specifically, we can compare the conservative-liberal gap for each state with the percentage of votes subsequently cast for Obama and Romney to get a fairly good measure of the extent to which conservatives voted against their own ideological beliefs.

If, for example, a state where Gallup tells us there is a 15-point edge for conservatives went for Obama by 12 points, we would have a “conservative confusion” index of 27 points, and thus a rough measure of how many conservatives either voted for the liberal candidate or simply stayed home and left the playing field to the other (left) side.

The first point to realize is that liberals outnumber conservatives, according to Gallup, in only three states-Hawaii, Massachusetts and Vermont (by only 0.7, 2.8, and 5.6 percentage points respectively)-worth only 18 electoral votes. In contrast, the conservative advantage was greater than 10 percentage points in no less than 36 states worth 355 electoral votes.

But when applying the “conservative confusion” index we discover no less than 20 states where there was a more than a 20-point discrepancy between the conservative-liberal balance and the Obama-Romney vote.

Among those were such electoral heavyweights as California (+26), Illinois (+24), Michigan (+23), New Jersey (+21), New York (+29), Ohio (+21), and Pennsylvania (+23). Even better illustrating the point, there was a +37 gap for Rhode Island (where, despite a 10-point conservative edge, the state went for Obama by 27 points) and a +32 gap for Maryland (a 6.5-point edge for conservatives but a win for Obama by 26 points).

As such, Arkansas was one of only four states where Romney’s performance at the ballot box actually exceeded (by four points) the degree of conservative ideological advantage reported by Gallup (the others being Utah, West Virginia and Oklahoma).

Simply put, in the vast majority of states, Romney did much worse than the Gallup breakdown would predict, actually losing by double digits a number of important states where self-identified conservatives outnumbered self-identified liberals by double digits.

When conservatives outnumber liberals by 18 points in a crucial state and then see the GOP candidate lose that state by four points, as was the case with Mitt Romney in Ohio, we can conclude that a lot of self-identified conservatives ended up voting for the most left-wing president in U.S. history (or, again, simply stayed home).

All of which raises another interesting question for Arkansans-will a state that went for Obama’s opponent by 33 points now re-elect a senator (Mark Pryor) who will support just about everything Obama proposes? If so, why?

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial, Pages 11 on 02/10/2014