Thermostatic Party Identification

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.   Events could change things abruptly, but the early signs are favorable for Democrats in the 2026 midterms.

 Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

The political landscape in the U.S. changed greatly in the first year of Trump’s second term as president. A record-high percentage of U.S. adults said they identify with neither major party, and a shift in independents’ political leanings caused the Republican Party advantage that aided Trump’s reelection to dissipate almost as soon as he took office. Over the course of the year, the Democratic Party regained and expanded its advantage in party leanings, a trend that was borne out in the party’s strong performance in 2025 special elections compared to similar races in the more Republican-favorable 2024 election cycle.

Importantly, these party shifts do not indicate that Americans are warming to the Democratic Party. In fact, favorable ratings of the Democratic Party are no better than those of the Republican Party, and are among the worst Gallup has recorded for the Democratic Party historically.

Rather, as in 2022 through 2024, these recent political shifts appear to be a consequence of one party’s association with an unpopular incumbent president (the Democrats with Biden and now Republicans with Trump). Negative evaluations of the president’s performance appear to persuade a subset of Americans, primarily political independents who have weaker attachments to either party, to side with the opposition party.

This dynamic has led to frequent changes in the party power structure in Washington in recent federal election cycles, with the incumbent president’s party losing control of the presidency or one house of Congress in each of the past six presidential or midterm elections.

And the long-term future does not look bright for the GOP: 

Gen Z Rejects GOP

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.

Mike Allen at Axios:

Gen Xers have always been a swing voting group, but their kids — Gen Z, sometimes called Zoomers — overwhelmingly back Democrats.

What they're saying: "Generational replacement will not be kind to Trump’s Republican Party," John Della Volpe, polling director at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, and CEO of SocialSphere, told me.

Della Volpe will be out tomorrow with "Fight: How Gen Z Is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America," digging into the mindset of these 70 million young Americans born beginning in the mid-1990s.

"They are the most diverse and most educated generation in history," Della Volpe writes.

The big picture: Della Volpe says five events shaped this rising bloc:

• Occupy Wall Street: Millennial-led discussions about inequality became political drivers as Zoomers came of age.
• Donald Trump.
• The Parkland, Fla., high school shooting and March for Our Lives movement.
• 17-year-old Darnella Frazier's use of her iPhone to record the murder of George Floyd.
• Greta Thunberg's climate strike.

GOP is Going South

Our forthcoming book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.  GOP conservatism is in intellectual decline.

Texas' decision to have a separate, underfunded electrical grid led to disaster last week. Lloyd Green at The Guardian:

Innocent lives have been lost and upended in the name of retrograde ideology masked as policy. Real people, families and business have been destroyed. Climate change denial comes with a high human cost. Standing apart from the national electric grid isn’t independence. It is a death wish by another name.

Confederacy 2.0.

Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the breakaway states, summed up this attitude in 1861: “If Charleston harbor needs improvement, let the commerce of Charleston bear the burden. If the mouth of the Savannah River has to be cleared out, let the sea-going navigation which is benefited by it, bear the burden.”

Sounds familiar?

Other than when it came to repelling Abraham Lincoln, the Confederacy was not a mutual assistance pact. Before this latest man-made debacle, Republicans were dreaming of drowning government in a bathtub. Hopefully, in Texas that may change.

Nick Corasaniti, Annie Karni and Isabella Grullón Paz at NYT:

 An analysis of January voting records by The New York Times found that nearly 140,000 Republicans had quit the party in 25 states that had readily available data (19 states do not have registration by party). Voting experts said the data indicated a stronger-than-usual flight from a political party after a presidential election, as well as the potential start of a damaging period for G.O.P. registrations as voters recoil from the Capitol violence and its fallout.

 Julia Terruso and Jonathan Lai at The Philadelphia Inquirer:

About 19,000 Pennsylvanians have left the Republican Party since Jan 6. That’s a drop in the bucket for a state with more than 8.8 million registered voters, and almost 3.5 million Republicans. But it’s also an unusually high rate of defections: Almost two-thirds of the voters who have switched parties this year left the GOP, compared with a third or less typically.

David Brooks at NYT:

The party is politically viable, but it is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Under Trump it became an apocalyptic personality cult. But you should know, as I’m sure you do, that there are many Republicans who want to change their party and make it a vehicle for conservative ideas...This is a struggle to create a Republican Party that is democratic and not authoritarian, patriotic and not nationalistic, conservative and not reactionary, benevolent and not belligerent, intellectually self-confident and not apocalyptic and dishonest.

Republicans will beat Trumpism not by confronting it directly but by focusing on policymaking, by becoming a regular party once again. As Senator Ben Sasse put it, it’s to make the Republican Party about more than one dude. You may have noticed that this week, Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton are teaming up on an effort to raise the minimum wage and enforce immigration laws, two plans to boost working class wages. That’s what there needs to be more of.

Will this work? Is the Republican Party salvageable? Nobody knows. Right now Republicans are rallying around Trump because they believe Democrats and the media are going after him. It’s pie in the sky to ask rank-and-file Republicans to denounce the man they’ve clung to. But, as has been observed, we Americans don’t solve our problems, we just leave them behind.

 

Trump, the GOP, and Survey Data

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well underway.   

Dan Balz and Scott Clement at WP report on a new poll showing Biden ahead of Trump 55 percent to 40 percent among registered voters

Despite the president’s attempts to shift the electorate’s focus to his criticisms of Biden, both candidates’ supporters are treating the November election as a referendum on Trump. Among Trump voters, 72 percent say what is most important is reelecting the president, including 47 percent who say this is extremely important, while 21 percent say their motivation is to defeat Biden.

Among Biden voters, the results are roughly the opposite, with 67 percent saying what is most important is defeating the president, including 48 percent who say this is extremely important, and 24 percent saying that electing the former vice president is their main motivation.
...
The current standing between the president and his challenger appears closely tied to overall impressions of how Trump is dealing with the country’s major problems. His job approval rating has dropped sharply in the past two months and stands at 39 percent positive and 57 percent negative among voting-age adults, with 48 percent of Americans saying they strongly disapprove of the way he is doing his job. In a late-March poll, when just two points separated Biden and Trump in a head-to-head test, Trump’s approval rating stood at 48 percent positive and 46 percent negative.

...
The Post-ABC poll finds Trump’s recent decline in support is concentrated in states that have averaged at least 30 daily coronavirus cases per 100,000 residents over the past week, a group that includes Florida, Texas, Arizona and Georgia. Trump led by double digits among voters in these states in May, but the latest survey shows Biden with a slight advantage. 

Scott Clement and Dan Balz at WP:

Americans’ views of President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic have deteriorated significantly as cases rise across the country and personal fears of becoming infected persist, a Washington Post-ABC News poll finds.

The Post-ABC poll shows 38 percent of Americans approve of his handling of the outbreak, down from 46 percent in May and 51 percent in March. Sixty percent disapprove, up from 53 percent in May and 45 percent in March.

More than half of the public — 52 percent — now disapproves “strongly” of Trump’s handling of the outbreak, roughly double the percentage who say they strongly approve of his efforts and an increase from 36 percent in strong disapproval since March.As Trump’s numbers have declined in recent weeks, our NBC/WSJ poll shows that some of that erosion has come from inside his own party — among the non-Trump wing of the GOP.

Trump doesn’t have a base problem. Rather, he has a Republican problem.https://t.co/OxBXm5yzrv pic.twitter.com/KGbT4I91LP

— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) July 17, 2020

Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Carrie Dann and Melissa Holzberg at NBC News:

One figure continually stands out for President Trump in our new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll: 50 percent.

And not in a good way for him.

Fifty percent of all registered voters in our poll “strongly” disapprove of the president.

Fifty percent say there is no chance at all they will vote for him.

...

And another 37 percent of voters saying the same about Biden.

That leaves 13 percent who are up for grabs, saying there is a fair/small/slight chance they might change their minds about either Trump or Biden.

So who are these 13 percent? They have negative impressions of both Trump and Biden, but Biden’s fav/unfav with them is slightly worse (11 percent positive, 45 percent negative) than Trump’s (22 percent positive, 43 percent negative).

They prefer Republicans in control of Congress by almost a 2-to-1 margin, 42 percent to 25 percent.

But their 2016 vote was split four different ways: 20 percent of them voted for Trump, 21 percent for Hillary Clinton, 21 percent voted third party, and 27 percent didn’t vote.

And it’s that last thing that should give us pause about these up-for-grabs voters: Just 40 percent of them have high interest in the 2020 election, versus 77 percent of all voters in our poll.

Bottom line: Many of them aren’t likely voters.

Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

Since January, Americans' party preferences have shifted dramatically in the Democratic Party's direction. What had been a two-percentage-point Republican advantage in U.S. party identification and leaning has become an 11-point Democratic advantage, with more of that movement reflecting a loss in Republican identification and leaning (down eight points) than a gain in Democratic identification and leaning (up five points).

Line graph. Fifty percent of Americans identify as Democrats or are independents who lean toward the Democratic Party while 39% are Republicans or Republican leaning independents. In January, 47% were Republicans or Republican leaners and 45% were Democrats and Democratic leaners.

\Currently, half of U.S. adults identify as Democrats (32%) or are independents who lean toward the Democratic Party (18%). Meanwhile, 39% identify as Republicans (26%) or are Republican leaners (13%).

These results are based on monthly averages of Gallup U.S. telephone surveys in 2020.
In January and February, the months in which the U.S. Senate tried and acquitted President Donald Trump on impeachment charges brought by the House of Representatives, slightly more Americans preferred the Republican Party to the Democratic Party.

In March, as the nation began to deal with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, Democrats gained a slight two-point advantage, which persisted in April and May.
The greatest movement occurred in June -- likely because of increased attention to racial injustice that followed the death of George Floyd while in police custody on May 25, as well as increased U.S. struggles to contain the coronavirus spread.

In June alone, there was a three-point increase in Democratic identification and leaning, and a corresponding five-point drop in Republican identification and leaning.

Gallup says partisanship (including leaners) went from 47% Dem - 44% Rep to 50% D - 39% R just from May to June this year. I’ll buy some movement from the pandemic & protest, but that likely signals some large partisan non-response patterns
https://t.co/NgkDZ5euvi

— Matt Grossmann (@MattGrossmann) July 16, 2020

GOP Strength

Gallup reports:

Republican states continue to outnumber Democratic states based on residents' party affiliation throughout 2016. Overall, Gallup classifies 21 states as solid or leaning Republican, 14 as solid or leaning Democratic, and 15 states as competitive. That seven-state GOP advantage contrasts with a 30-state Democratic advantage in 2008.

Although there are more Republican states, the Democratic states tend to be more populous. As a result, Democrats maintain a slight edge in party affiliation nationwide, 47% to 42%. This Democratic advantage, too, has declined considerably since 2008, one of the stronger Democratic years on record, when Democrats led 52% to 40%. That year, Republican President George W. Bush's job approval ratings hovered around 30% as the nation dealt with the worst economic problems seen in generations, while still engaged in two prolonged wars overseas.

Chris Cillizza writes:

In the House, Republicans are now in the midst of a sustained period in which they control more seats than they have since the late 1940s. In the Senate, Republicans not only control 52 seats but have an election cycle in 2018 in which they could, plausibly, approach the coveted 60-vote plateau.

Given those numbers, it's not possible to argue that the Democratic Party is the healthier of the two national parties at the moment.

Now, the history of politics is littered with parties that overestimated their mandates and within a few years found themselves on the outside looking in when it comes to control of the levers of political power. And there is already some of that rhetoric seeping out of this White House.

"The message came through loud and clear that people want forceful leadership," Spicer said Monday of the 2016 election results. That's true — sort of. Trump did win the electoral college. But he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. And, while Republicans held onto their congressional majorities, they did lose ground in both chambers.

At the moment, it's Republicans who have every right to brag about their dominant status as a national party. But always remember that pride comes before the fall.

Changes in the Parties Since 1992

Pew reports on the changing composition of the parties:

Percent of partisans and leaners with various characteristics

1992                2016

GOP white                                                                              93                    86

Democrat white                                                                      76                    57

GOP  aged 65 or more                                                            19                    25

Democrats aged 65 or more                                                    19                    19

GOP  college graduates                                                          28                    31

Democrat college graduates                                                    21                    27

GOP Noncollege whites                                                         67                    58

Democrat noncollege whites                                                   59                    32

GOP religiously unaffiliated                                                   06                    12

Democrat religiously unaffiliated                                           10                    29

---

[

The Red Shift Continues

Gallup reports:

Gallup's analysis of political party affiliation at the state level in 2015 finds that 20 states are solidly Republican or leaning Republican, compared with 14 solidly Democratic or leaning Democratic states. The remaining 16 are competitive. This is the first time in Gallup's eight years of tracking partisanship by state that there have been more Republican than Democratic states. It also marks a dramatic shift from 2008, when Democratic strength nationally was its greatest in recent decades.

Importantly, even though Republicans claim a greater number of states, Democrats continue to hold an edge nationally in partisanship. In 2015 Gallup Daily tracking data, 43% of all U.S. adults identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic, compared with 40% identifying as Republican or leaning Republican. That is largely because many of the most populous states, including California, New York and Illinois, are Democratically aligned.