We are, indeed, a nation divided.
According to Fox News Digital, we are “heading into the 2024 presidential election, seeing one of the most evenly split electorates in the past two decades.”
The outlet cites a new analysis from the Pew Research Center that examines party identification among registered voters over the years spanning 1994 – 2023.
“Many of the factors long associated with voters’ partisanship remain firmly in place,” Pew states. “For decades, gender, race and ethnicity, and religious affiliation have been important dividing lines in politics. This continues to be the case today.”
“Yet there also have been profound changes – in some cases as a result of demographic change, in others because of dramatic shifts in the partisan allegiances of key groups,” the study found.
According to Pew: “The combined effects of change and continuity have left the country’s two major parties at virtual parity: About half of registered voters (49%) identify as Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party, while 48% identify as Republicans or lean Republican.”
“In recent decades, neither party has had a sizable advantage,” the study states, “but the Democratic Party has lost the edge it maintained from 2017 to 2021.”
While both parties are now more racially and ethnically diverse, Pew notes that diversity “has had a far greater impact on the composition of the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.”
Pew reports:
The share of voters who are Hispanic has roughly tripled since the mid-1990s; the share who are Asian has increased sixfold over the same period.
Today, 44% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters are Hispanic, Black, Asian, another race or multiracial, compared with 20% of Republicans and Republican leaners.
However, the Democratic Party’s advantages among Black and Hispanic voters, in particular, have narrowed somewhat in recent years.
Education plays a role in partisanship but that, too, is changing.
“The share of voters with a four-year bachelor’s degree keeps increasing, reaching 40% in 2023,” Pew found. “And the gap in partisanship between voters with and without a college degree continues to grow, especially among White voters.”
“More than six-in-ten White voters who do not have a four-year degree (63%) associate with the Republican Party, which is up substantially over the past 15 years,” Pew explains. “White college graduates are closely divided; this was not the case in the 1990s and early 2000s, when they mostly aligned with the GOP.”
Between the two genders, it’s a “modest” Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus scenario:
By a modest margin, women voters continue to align with the Democratic Party (by 51% to 44%), while nearly the reverse is true among men (52% align with the Republican Party, 46% with the Democratic Party).
The gender gap is about as wide among married men and women. The gap is wider among men and women who have never married; while both groups are majority Democratic, 37% of never-married men identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP, compared with 24% of never-married women.
In a completely unsurprising finding, Pew reports that younger Americans have been sliding into the Democrats’ pockets:
Today, each younger age cohort is somewhat more Democratic-oriented than the one before it.
The youngest voters (those ages 18 to 24) align with the Democrats by nearly two-to-one (66% to 34% Republican or lean GOP); majorities of older voters (those in their mid-60s and older) identify as Republicans or lean Republican.
While there have been wide age divides in American politics over the last two decades, this wasn’t always the case; in the 1990s there were only very modest age differences in partisanship.
And, again, no one will be shocked to learn that rural Americans are moving “toward the GOP, while the suburbs remain divided.”
“In 2008, when Barack Obama sought his first term as president, voters in rural counties were evenly split in their partisan loyalties,” Pew reports. “Today, Republicans hold a 25 percentage point advantage among rural residents (60% to 35%).”
“There has been less change among voters in urban counties, who are mostly Democratic by a nearly identical margin (60% to 37%),” the study found. “The suburbs – perennially a political battleground – remain about evenly divided.”
“The steadily growing alignment between demographics and partisanship reveals an important aspect of steadily growing partisan polarization,” Pew concludes. “Republicans and Democrats do not just hold different beliefs and opinions about major issues, they are much more different racially, ethnically, geographically and in educational attainment than they used to be.”
“Yet over this period, there have been only modest shifts in overall partisan identification,” Pew found. “Voters remain evenly divided, even as the two parties have grown further apart.”
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Author: Melissa Fine
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