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The Liberal Party in NSW is confident its push to get more women into federal Parliament will succeed after reaching its target for the proportion of female councillors elected in recent local government polls.

Final results of the December 4 council elections released on Thursday show of the 120 Liberals voted in, 48 were women, with significant swings towards the party in many areas where a woman headed the ticket.

Georgia Ryburn, pictured with her five-week-old baby Harvey, is among a wave of women elected to local councils for the Liberals.Credit:Flavio Brancaleone

This almost doubles the percentage of Liberal women elected to 40 per cent, from 21 per cent in 2017, meeting the goal the state division set for local government in 2019.

Its part of a wave of women of all political stripes elected to local governments across the state. Councils including Parramatta, Randwick and Woollahra now have a majority of female councillors.

NSW Liberal Womens Council president Mary-Lou Jarvis, who is also the state divisions vice-president, said achieving the 40 per cent target was the result of four years of methodical and committed work to identify women interested in running, and actively mentoring and supporting them.

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Its the collaborative work of the NSW division and womens council, with men recognising the need for change, she said. Where weve had women standing and leading tickets, weve had swings towards us. It shows ... that where weve got women, we win.

These swings were as high as 10 points in the Hornsby local government area while in Sutherland Shire, a two-point swing in the ward where the ticket was led by Louise Sullivan meant the Liberals got a second candidate elected and gained control of the council.

And in blue-ribbon Woollahra, where Ms Jarvis led the ticket in the Vaucluse ward, the party won a three-point swing to get 63 per cent of the overall vote.

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Where weve got women, we win: NSW Liberals aim to replicate local government success at federal level - Sydney Morning Herald

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil. Charles Krauthammer

Even liberals who've accomplished a lot in their lives and have high IQs often say things on a regular basis that are stunningly, profoundly stupid and at odds with the way the world works. Modern liberalism has become so bereft of common sense and instinctually suicidal that America can only survive over the long haul by thwarting the liberal agenda. In fact, liberalism has become such a toxic and poisonous philosophy that most liberals wouldn't behave differently if their goal were to deliberately destroy the country. So, how does liberalism cause well-meaning, intelligent liberals to get this way? Well, it starts with...

1) Liberalism creates a feedback loop. It is usually impossible for a non-liberal to change a liberal's mind about political issues because liberalism works like so: only liberals are credible sources of information. How do you know someone's liberal? He espouses liberal doctrine. So, no matter how plausible what you say may be, it will be ignored if you're not a liberal and if you are a liberal, of course, you probably agree with liberal views. This sort of close-mindedness makes liberals nearly impervious to any information that might undermine their beliefs.

2) Liberals sources of information are ever present. Conservatives are regularly exposed to the liberal viewpoint whether they want to be or not. That's not necessarily so for liberals. Imagine the average day for liberals. They get up and read their local newspaper. It has a liberal viewpoint. They take their kids to school, where the teachers are liberal. Then they go to work, listen to NPR which has a liberal viewpoint on the way home, and then turn on the nightly news which also skews leftward. From there, they turn on TV and watch shows created by liberals that lean to the left, if they have any political viewpoint at all. Unless liberals actively seek out conservative viewpoints, which is unlikely, the only conservative arguments they're probably going to hear are going to be through the heavily distorted, poorly translated, deeply skeptical lens of other liberals.

3) Liberals emphasize feeling superior, not superior results. Liberalism is all about appearances, not outcomes. What matters to liberals is how a program makes them FEEL about themselves, not whether it works or not. Thus a program like Headstart, which sounds good because it's designed to help children read, makes liberals feel good about themselves, even though the program doesn't work and wastes billions. A ban on DDT makes liberals feel good about themselves because they're "protecting the environment" even though millions of people have died as a result. For liberals, it's not what a program does in the real world; it's about whether they feel better about themselves for supporting it.

4) Liberals are big believers in moral relativism. This spins them round and round because if the only thing that's wrong is saying that there's an absolute moral code, then you lose your ability to tell cause from effect, good from bad, and right from wrong. Taking being non-judgmental to the level that liberals do leaves them paralyzed, pondering "why they hate us" because they feel incapable of saying, That's wrong," and doing something about it. If you're against firm standards and condemning immoral behavior, then your moral compass wont work and youll also be for immorality, as well as societal and cultural decay by default.

5) Liberals tend to view people as parts of groups, not individuals. One of the prejudices of liberalism is that they see everyone as part of a group, not as an individual. This can lead to rather bizarre disparities when say, a man from a group that they consider to be powerless, impoverished victims becomes the leader of the free world -- and he's challenged by a group of lower middle class white people who've banded together because individually they're powerless. If you listen to the liberal rhetoric, you might think Barack Obama was a black Republican being surrounded by a KKK lynching party 100 years ago -- as opposed to the single most powerful man in America abusing the authority of his office to attack ordinary Tea Partiers who have the audacity to speak the truth to power for the good of their country.

6) Liberals take a dim view of personal responsibility. Who's at fault if a criminal commits a crime? The criminal or society? If someone creates a business and becomes a millionaire, is that the result of hard work and talent or luck? If you're dirt poor, starving, and haven't worked in 5 years, is that a personal failing or a failure of the state? Conservatives would tend to say the former in each case, while liberals would tend to say the latter. But when you disconnect what an individual does from the results that happen in his life, it's very difficult to understand cause and effect in people's lives.

7) Liberals give themselves far too much credit just for being liberal. To many liberals, all one needs to do to be wise, intelligent, compassionate, open minded, and sensitive is to BE LIBERAL. In other words, many of the good things about a person spring not from his actions, but from the ideology he holds. This has an obvious appeal. You can be a diehard misogynist, but plausibly call yourself a feminist, hate blacks, but accuse others of racism, have a subpar IQ and be an intellectual, give nothing to charity and be compassionate, etc., etc., and all you have to do is call yourself a liberal. It's a shortcut to virtue much like the corrupt old idea of religious indulgences. Why live a life of virtue when you could live a sinful life and buy your way into heaven? If you're a liberal, why actually live a life of virtue when you can merely call yourself a liberal and get credit for being virtuous, even when you've done nothing to earn it?

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7 Reasons Why Liberals Are Incapable of Understanding The ...

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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The residents of most U.S. states are more likely to identify as conservative than as liberal in their political ideology. In 25 states, the conservative advantage is significantly greater than the national average, including 19 "highly conservative" states in which conservatives outnumber liberals by at least 20 percentage points. Meanwhile, in six states, there are more liberals than conservatives.

Nationally, the conservative advantage in ideological identification is nine percentage points, and reflects a narrowing of the conservative-liberal gap from 21 points in 2004.

These findings are based on aggregated data from Gallup's 2018 tracking poll in which respondents were asked to indicate whether they describe their political views as liberal, moderate or conservative.

States in which the conservative-liberal gap is 20 points or greater are considered "highly conservative." The "more conservative than average" states have gaps of between 15 and 19 points. "About average" states' residents prefer the conservative description by seven to 14 points, and those with gaps of zero to six points are considered "less conservative than average."

The number of states in which more residents identify as liberal than as conservative is down slightly from nine in 2017. Many of the changes are within the margin of error for the state's sample -- states that barely tilted liberal in 2017 barely tilted conservative in 2018 -- so it is unclear how meaningful these changes are.

Mississippi ranked as the most conservative state in 2018, with 50% of residents identifying as conservative and 12% as liberal, for a gap of 38 points. Twenty-nine percent of Mississippians said they are moderate, and 9% had no opinion.

Massachusetts was the most liberal state in 2018, with 35% of its residents describing their political views as liberal and 21% as conservative. Massachusetts was the first state Gallup measured with more liberal than conservative identifiers (in 2008) and has been the state most consistently leaning more liberal than conservative.

The full results for each state follow.

State Ideological Identification, 2018

Editor's Note: The story has been updated to correct the sample size of national adults.

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Conservatives Greatly Outnumber Liberals in 19 U.S. States

This view garners further support from the research on happiness. A Pew Research study, for instance, ties the Republican attainment of happiness advantage over Democrats in part to more marriage, greater family satisfaction and higher levels of religious attendance.

In a separate study of the conservative-liberal happiness gap, the psychologists Barry R. Schlenker, John Chambers and Bonnie Le explore liberal disengagement from family and faith. They note, Liberals have become less happy over the last several decades, but this decline is associated with increasingly secular attitudes and actions (e.g., less religiosity, less likelihood of being married, and perhaps lessened belief in personal agency).

In our survey, we found a modest gap between conservatives and liberals age 18 to 55 in being very happy with 22 percent of conservatives reporting they are very happy compared with 17 percent of liberals (conservatives are also a bit more likely to say they are pretty happy). This gap is not explained by socioeconomic differences in income, race, age and gender between the two groups. But once we control for marriage, parenthood, family satisfaction, religious attendance and community satisfaction, the ideological gap in happiness disappears.

On Thanksgiving, a holiday so many of us spend with our loved ones, we emphasize that of all these social factors, the biggest factor predicting overall happiness is satisfaction with family life. Certainly this doesnt determine the direction of causation, but the findings advance the case that support and social connections particularly at home are important for happiness.

As part of our research, we spoke to a number of Americans about family. The case of Katie, a 38-year-old Virginia married mother of two, illustrates the point. This right-leaning woman has noticed a difference between her life before and after she married and had children. Although she has less time for herself, she much prefers her new status as a married mother. Shes less lonely and finds more purpose and meaning in the mundane day-to-day life, as well as exciting times when my kids hit certain milestones.

She reported a fuller happiness now as a wife and mother, in part because it is shared with her husband, children and extended family members as well as friends who are also raising families with whom, she said, she often has a common ground to talk about.

The connection between social ties and happiness also applies to those on the left. Julie, a 46-year-old, self-described progressive mother of four in Salt Lake City, has been married for more than two decades and is engaged in community volunteering; shes also active in her local church. She works full time and balances a dizzying array of responsibilities. Its her home life, however, where she finds the greatest joys and the greatest struggles. But each commitment, she said, brings an opportunity to connect with people around me.

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Opinion | How Liberals Can Be Happier - The New York Times