It’s not just the vitriol surrounding this year’s upcoming election: More conservatives than ever distrust science, according to a report released Thursday.

Just 35 percent of conservatives said they had a “great deal of trust in science” in 2010, a 28 percent decline since 1974, when 48 percent of conservatives—about the same percentage as liberals—trusted science. Liberal and moderate support for science has remained essentially flat since 1974, according to Gordon Gauchat, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He published his findings in the journalAmerican Sociological Review.

Gauchat says conservatives’ rebellion against the “elite” and the shifting role of science in society is to blame for the decline. He argues that the conservative minority has rebelled against science in the same way it has against media and higher education.

“It kind of began with the loss of Barry Goldwater and the construction of Fox News and all these [conservative] think tanks. The perception among conservatives is that they’re at a disadvantage, a minority,” he says. “It’s not surprising that the conservative subculture would challenge what’s viewed as the dominant knowledge production groups in society—science and the media.”

Our progress as a nation - and our values as a nation - are rooted in free and open inquiry. To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy.” Meanwhile, Santorum has called human-caused climate change a “hoax,” and “patently absurd,” and has said that teaching evolution “promotes atheism.”

Gauchat says those two issues are where conservatives most readily reject science.

“…reality has a well-known liberal bias.” - Stephen Colbert

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