Gap between Democrats and Republicans grows ever wider
Demographic shifts reinforce polarization of the major parties
Barack Obama’s presidency appears to have profoundly shifted the voter coalitions behind the two major parties, with older and blue-collar whites moving to the Republicans as college graduates and secular voters have accelerated their shift to the Democrats.
The result, as this election season moves toward a snarling finale, is two parties whose voters differ more from each other than at any point in a generation, according to a new study by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, based on interviews of some 8,000 voters this year.
About a third of voters currently call themselves independents — more than say they are Republicans and about the same share as those who call themselves Democrats. But the vast majority of those self-proclaimed independents lean toward one party of the other. Repeated studies have shown them to be reliably partisan in their voting behavior.
Including those who lean left or right politically, the number of voters who identify with either of the two parties remains closely balanced, Pew found: 48 percent for Democrats and 44 percent for Republicans. That’s the same partisan division that existed four years ago, when Obama was re-elected.
Underneath that apparent stability, however, a change is occurring:
The Democrats have continued a rapid move toward greater ethnic and racial diversity, changing faster than the electorate as a whole. As the nation’s Latino and Asian-American populations have grown, the Democrats have most of their votes while retaining the loyalty of nearly nine out of 10 African-Americans. The party has made strong gains among younger voters and among the growing number of nonreligious Americans and those with advanced education.
While the Democrats have gone broader, the Republicans have gone deeper, building support among their existing core groups — whites and older voters, especially men and those without college degrees.
The result: two parties sharply split along lines of culture, outlook and experience, divisions that go much deeper than political ideology for most voters.
Democrats have become the party of the nation’s youthful, increasingly secular, racially and ethnically diverse urban population. Republicans represent an older America, both literally, given their backing from voters older than 50, and figuratively, with support centered on white, religiously devout Protestants in nonurban areas.
In each of those areas, the Republican advantage springs from parts of the population that are in decline.
Whites, for example, now make up 70 percent of the nation’s registered voters, down from 84 percent in 1992.
By contrast, the Latino share of the electorate has almost doubled in the past quarter-century, from 5 percent to 9 percent, and continues to grow, as does the Asian-American population, now with about 2 percent of voters. The black share has risen slightly, from 10 percent to 12 percent.
One part of the GOP coalition in particular, whites without a college education, has become identified with Trump, providing his most loyal supporters. The GOP holds a 59 percent to 33 percent advantage among such voters.
The shift has been driven primarily by men. Almost two-thirds of white men without college degrees now identify with or lean toward the GOP, while among white women without a degree, about half do.
Whites without a college education made up almost six in 10 Democrats in 1992, the year Bill Clinton first won the White House. Now, as Hillary Clinton runs, non-college-educated whites count for just one in three Democrats. Their share among Republicans has dropped only slightly in that time, from 67 percent to 58 percent.
The Pew data do not show what motivated those voters. Other research, however, has shown that Trump’s support corresponds closely to voters’ standing on measurements of racial animosity. That suggests that at least some of the shift in partisanship came in response to Democrats being associated in voters’ minds with the first black man to occupy to Oval Office.
While Republicans have gained ground among those without a college degree, Democrats have picked up support at the other end of the scale, a shift that began during Bush’s second term.
Since 1992, the share of Democrats with a college education has increased from about one in five to more than one in three. Among Republicans, the share with a college degree has remained steady and is now slightly below the Democratic level.
Democrats’ gaining among the collegeeducated while Republicans amass support among those without degrees creates a long-term advantage for the Democrats because college graduates are growing as a share of the voting population.
About a third of voters now have college degrees, another third have some college experience but not a four-year degree, and the remainder have not attended college. In 1992, half of voters had no college experience and fewer than one-quarter had a degree.
Along with those shifts along lines of race and education, the two parties are also divided by age.
Republicans used to be younger on average than Democrats, in part because for many years, Democrats depended on support from the generation that came of age under Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. But in the last couple of decades, as the World War II generation has passed away, older voters have become central to Republican electoral chances.
At the same time, voters 35 and younger, the millennial generation, have emerged as a key part of the Democratic coalition. Millennials, who are now equal to baby boomers as a share of the electorate, lean toward the Democrats 57 percent to 36 percent. That’s partly because the generation is more racially diverse than older generations.
But even among white millennials, the Democrats have parity with the Republicans. By contrast, the GOP has the edge among all older generations of white voters.
The Republican edge among older voters and the Democratic advantage among younger ones affects another important part of people’s identity: religion.
Democrats have become the party of choice for the nation’s “nones,” as Pew refers to them — the rapidly growing and generally youthful part of the population who consider themselves agnostics, atheists or “nothing in particular” when asked about religion. Republicans have solidified the loyalty of the nation’s white, evangelical Protestants.
The Pew study has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.2 percentage points.