WALL STREET JOURNAL: To judge by its most famous slogan, Occupy Wall Street sees itself as a movement made up of those in the bottom 99% of the income distribution. But what are the actual demographics of the committed protesters inside New York’s Zuccotti Park, the movement’s birthplace and most visible manifestation?

Douglas Schoen, a veteran Democratic Party pollster who has also worked for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, sent a researcher from his polling firm down to Zuccotti Park last week to conduct what appears to be the very first professional survey of the protesters in New York. The face-to-face interviews with 198 people informed an essay by Schoen in The Journal’s opinion pages.

Putting aside Schoen’s analysis — the subhead on his piece pegs the protesters as “leftists out of step with most American voters,” if you’re curious — let’s focus instead on the raw data, which he was kind enough to publish on his personal website. The findings are quite surprising.

The protesters as a group are young, but Zuccotti Park is not nearly the youth-only movement depicted in the media. While 49% of protesters are under 30, more than 28% are 40 or older. Only one-third of the crowd considers themselves Democrats — nearly the same portion who say they don’t identify with any party. (Zero respondents labeled themselves Republican.)

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