(Source: MIRS.news, Published 04/19/2024) The divide in modern day American politics isn’t relegated to the hallowed halls of the Capitol, but is stark among many different demographics, according to a Pew Research Center report.
It found the demographics of the Democrats and Republicans in the United States have changed significantly since 1994. The gender, ethnicity, religion, education, geographic, and generational divides have shifted, and in some cases become more apparent.
“One of the things that people who study political parties know is that the parties are constantly changing,” said Western Michigan University Political Science professor John Clark.
Clark said most of the time the changes in parties are not seen, because those changes don’t have much impact. But when the national numbers are as close as they've been the last two presidential elections, it forces politicos to scrutinize every shift.
“There are candidates and political leaders who are constantly trying to figure out what they can do in order to get a few more votes. ‘What can I do to attract a few more people to my side?’” he said.
The Pew data has the country's registered voters bifurcated with 49 percent on the Democratic side and 48 percent on the Republican side. The remaining 3 percent did not answer the question. In the mid-'90s, the Republicans enjoyed a lead. This switched to a blue lead between 2004 and 2012. The collapse to a slim margin came in the 2016 presidential election.
The diversity among voters has had a larger impact on the Democrats than the Republicans, with more Hispanic and Asian voters joining the ranks, with 5 percent in 1996 growing to 16 percent in 2023. The Republicans have also seen more Hispanics and Asians join, but not to the same extent, with about 4 percent in 1996 to about 9 percent in 2023.
The total number of Hispanic voters has tripled since the mid-1990s and the number of Asian voters has increased six times.
The partisanship in education has seen a dramatic shift. People with no degrees were moving from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in 2023. The opposite has happened with people holding college degrees.
The divide is most stark among individuals with postgraduate degrees, where only 37 percent follow Republican ideology.
The Pew report found women still favor the Democrats. Republicans have the advantage with married women, which is the only demographic.
Someone who has never been married has an even larger Democratic Party leaning. Women with children, while trending Republican higher than singles, still favor Democrats.
The LBGTQ+ skews overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party.
Unions still tend to be more Democrat 59 percent, than Republican, at 39 percent.
The poor and working class still favor Democrats, while the upper-middle lean to the GOP. The rich trend more toward the Democrats with 53 percent. The American middle class is nearly split, with 48 percent Democrat and 51 percent Republican.
Veterans swing widely to the Republican side, with a divide between white veterans and Black veterans. Black veterans lean by an 82 percent margin toward the Democrat side, while white veterans have a 72 percent swing toward the Republican side.
Among the age groups, it still plays out the same as it ever was, with the young tending to vote Democrat, a split happening for those in their 40s and 50s, and a Republican leaning in their 60s and 80s. The Pew data shows a split in the older Baby Boomers, with those in their 70s going 46 percent to the Democrats and 51 percent to the Republicans.
The Pew Research Center found that as people get older, the less likely they are to “lean” Democrat or Republican. They are more likely to identify with their party of choice.
While the suburbs are nearly split with 50 percent favoring Republicans and 47 percent favoring Democrats, the urban areas swing Democrat, and the rural areas swing Republican. While the cities have been on the side of the Democrats since 1996, the rural areas were once split, until about 2010.
Religion was also a big division point in American politics, with Protestants and Mormons heavily favoring the Republican Party. The Black Protestants are heavily Democrat, to 84 percent. Hispanic Protestants are nearly split, with 45 percent on the Democratic side and 49 percent on the Republican side. White Evangelical Protestants are 85 percent in the Republican camp.
The Protestant trend toward Republicans is a newer trend only happening in the last decade.
While Catholics lean toward the Republican Party, the white Catholics favor Republicans more, with 61 percent. Hispanic Catholics favor the Democrats with 60 percent.
Jewish and Muslim faiths tend toward the Democrats, which has been seen as a polarizing issue over the war in Gaza.
Those who don’t identify with religion, or the Atheists and Agnostics, fall in the Dem camp.
The advantages for Democrats end up going to women with a college degree, people in cities, Hispanics, those born in the 1990s, anyone not affiliated with a religion, Asians, and an overwhelming number of Blacks.
The Republican advantage goes to those born in the 1940s, white men, rural voters, veterans, white voters without college, Mormons, and overwhelmingly white evangelical Protestants.
“The sort of the typical voter, whether they're Republican or whether they're a Democrat, I don't think that they realize the extent to which their identities and identity politics really affect them in a way that makes it kind of a challenge for thinking about public policy,” Clark said.
He said the current political parties have largely been driven by people who see themselves in the party and the policies coming out of the party.
As an example, he pointed to manufacturing and agricultural jobs being driven more by high-skilled workers with degrees, rather than the manual labor jobs in factories and farms of yesteryear.
With that, he said people without education are feeling left behind in terms of opportunity and when an education is obtained, people aren’t returning to the rural areas.
He pointed to the small towns in American, saying there used to be bank presidents and newspaper publishers who lived on main street.
“The Democratic Party isn’t connecting in the way that it once did in lots of places where the jobs used to be manual labor sorts of working-class jobs. Now those jobs are middle-class jobs and maybe the Democratic Party doesn’t appeal in the same way that it did,” he said.
He said the extreme edges of the party were also driving the divisions in the parties, especially among the religious and age divides.
“It becomes pretty easy for candidates from one party to point to the extreme edge of the opposition and say, look at how terrible those people are and listen to these crazy ideas that they have,” Clark said.
He said identity in politics was something that was not new, but identities used to have multiple layers that would pull people in many different directions.
“I think what we are seeing right now is that these identities line up in a unique way,” Clark said. “So, rather than being pulled in different directions by various identities, increasingly we’re seeing people pulled in the same direction by their multiple identities.”
He said it is something that hasn’t been seen before in American politics. This has led to people attaching themselves to a political term such as conservative or progressive, without knowing what those ideologies back on issues of public policy.
“That’s a problem because people are so locked in, and yet they’re not locked into some set of solutions. They’re just locked into a set of identities,” Clark said.
He said Michigan seems to be setting an example, both federally and state-wise, in terms of actually getting things done in the Legislature for the residents, rather than succumbing to digging their heels in because it goes against their identity politics.
He pointed to the number of the Michigan Congressional delegation that had joined the Problem Solvers Caucus. Reps. Haley Stevens (D-Birmingham), Elissa Slotkin (D-Holly), Dan Kildee (D-Flint), Debbie Dingell (D-Dearborn), Hillary Scholten (D-Grand Rapids), and John James (R-Shelby Township) are part of the caucus.
“Elected officials in Michigan, to a large extent, are still focused on finding policy solutions,” Clark said.
