An informal survey conducted by the fiscally conservative Beacon Hill Institute finds that while conservative voters may favor Massachusetts governor Jane Swift’s stands on taxes and other issues, they’re likely to balk at her watered-down position on bilingual education.

More than 250 readers of the Beacon Hill Institute’s publication NewsLink responded to a questionnaire that queried them on a host of fiscal and social issues. Swift was unmentioned in the survey, but as governor, her positions on numerous issues are well-known. The answers to most of the survey’s questions were expected. Fifty-three percent, for example, favored a state ballot initiative to abolish the state income tax. But in one key area — bilingual education — respondents differed with Swift.

On bilingual education, the governor has taken a moderate position: she opposes a ballot initiative that would eliminate the program and favors a compromise that would allow individual school systems to decide whether they want to keep it or not. Like all politicians, Swift would no doubt like to be all things to all people, and her bilingual-ed stance — coupled with her mother-of-three image and choice of openly gay former Melrose mayor Patrick Guerriero for her lieutenant-governor candidate — was presumably calculated to play well with a wide spectrum of state voters. But unlike Swift, almost 80 percent of respondents to the Beacon Hill Institute survey favored the abolition of bilingual education, suggesting that Swift’s compromise could lose her more support on the right than it gains her in the middle.