US about evenly split on parties, survey says

Republicans close identification gap

Democrats are heading into the general election campaign without the party identification advantage that they enjoyed four years ago, according to a study released Tuesday, driven partly by changing views of Black and Hispanic voters.

The Pew Research Center survey of more than 10,000 registered voters found the country was about evenly split between the major parties, with 49 percent identifying as Democrats or saying they lean Democratic and 48 percent identifying as or leaning Republican. Those results are from the nonpartisan group’s latest reading, in August. By comparison, Democrats held an advantage in party identification throughout the Trump administration, including a 51 percent to 46 percent edge in 2020.

Republicans’ gains in party affiliation largely occurred in the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency and are echoed in many other polls. But they mark a break from Democrats’ advantage on this basic measure of party affinity through most of the past three decades.

The Pew survey provides a comprehensive look at how each party’s coalition has shifted from the mid-1990s to 2023. Since 1996, the share of US registered voters who are Hispanic has grown from 4 percent to 13 percent, while the share who are Asian has grown from about 1 percent to 4 percent. In 2023, 44 percent of Democratic-leaning voters were non-white, as were 20 percent of Republican-leaning voters.

Democrats’ recent losses have been concentrated among Black and Hispanic voters, Pew found. The share of Black voters identifying or leaning Democratic fell from a high of 91 percent in 2016 to 88 percent in 2020 and 83 percent in 2023. Among Hispanic voters, Democratic identification fell from 68 percent in 2016 to 65 percent in 2020 and 61 percent last year.

Those declines are less dire for Democrats than other recent data, including 2023 Gallup polls that found 66 percent of Black adults leaned Democratic, along with 47 percent of Hispanic adults, both record lows. Both surveys suggest Biden has substantial work to do in reassembling his winning coalition from 2020 this November. A February Pew survey found Biden’s favorability rating among Latino adults fell to 37 percent, down from 44 percent last July, while Trump’s favorability increased from 28 percent to 34 percent over the same period.

The Pew survey found a 63 percent majority of Asian voters leaned Democratic in 2023, unchanged from 2020 but down from a high point of 81 percent in 2018. Among white voters, 56 percent leaned Republican while 41 percent leaned Democratic, close to their 55 percent-52 percent margin in 2020.

The report noted that while gender, race and ethnicity, and religious affiliation have long been political dividing lines, “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.”

One of the biggest shifts has been among white voters without college degrees, who made up a majority of the electorate in the 1990s and are still the “single largest group of voters across education levels, race and ethnicity,” according to the report. While this group was evenly divided between the parties as recently as 2007, they shifted toward Republicans during the Obama administration and were key to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. In 2023, white voters without degrees leaned Republican by a 30-point margin, 63 percent to 33 percent.

White college graduates have shifted gradually in the opposite direction: 58 percent leaned Republican in 1994, but today 51 percent lean Democratic.