You understand that a political characterization is just that, right? Actual human belief is nuanced.
Just as all democrats are not green-deal loving firearm ownership rejecting hippies, not all republicans are church going fox news watching SUV drivers.
I realize that, but the Republican voters are much more similar to each other (though it varies a lot by region) than the Democrat voters are to each other. Basically, conservatives are people who want to preserve the status quo (or perhaps go backwards to some halcyon time), and liberals are people who want a change to the status quo. This means that liberals are necessarily going to have different ideas about which direction they want to take, while conservatives are starting at the same place so they're necessarily going to agree more with each other.
And from my decades of experience of having family in the South, yes, most of them really are church-going Fox News watching pickup truck drivers (the SUV drivers are more the suburbanites; we were talking about trailer park dwellers here).
Here are some of the latest polls on gun control [1], abortion [2], and then a mixed general bag (same sex marriage, immigration, racial stuff) [3]. To save you the clicks on guns, for instance, there numbers for more/same/less strict for the republicans are 28/52/20. For democrats it's 80/15/4. For abortion legal/illegal it's 36/62 for republicans, 82/17 for democrats, etc. And the same is true on most if not all issues.
This is also a relatively new thing. In times past the democratic party obviously had a general direction (much as the republican party does) but views were much more diverse. I'm just hopeful that this might eventually help us start taking the steps necessary for a multi-party system. I think the extreme elements of both parties are causing them, alongside the entire US political system, to implode. The 'world leader' in democracy remaining a two-party figment of the past is quite absurd in any case.
>Basically, conservatives are people who want to preserve the status quo (or perhaps go backwards to some halcyon time), and liberals are people who want a change to the status quo.
I believe you are confusing liberals with progressives. As for Fox News, as biased as they are, CBS, MSNBC and CNN are right up there with them.
Mainstream media is a sad circus these days, not a single of the outlets are even remotely interested in facts or even a hint of objectivity, it's all about attacking 'the other side' by any means.
Just as all democrats are not green-deal loving firearm ownership rejecting hippies, not all republicans are church going fox news watching SUV drivers.