Support For Both US Political Parties Is Falling

At no point in the last seventy-five years have more Americans self-identified as Independent voters, and at no point in the last twenty-five years have less Americans self-identified as either Republicans or Democrats. Many of those who remain committed to one of the two parties are moving further to one extreme ideologically, and those left in the middle are growing more and more disenfranchised by the entire situation.

Those are the cliff notes of a new study from the Pew Research Center that found the American public is now divided into 38% Independents, 32% Democrats, 24% Republicans and 6% who refuse all labels. As recently as 2004, only 30% of Americans picked the Independent label, but those who have defected from one of the extremes have tended to remain in the middle rather than radically changing ideologically.

If the trend is for many to defect to the center, those who are still Republicans or Democrats seem to be further apart than ever. The Research Center found the single biggest difference between how people answered the forty-eight question phone interview about the environment, optimism, social responsibility and more wasn’t race, gender, education or class, it was political party. In the mid-90s, the partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats was approximately 9%, enough to make it clear there were obvious differences but an overwhelming commonality. Now that gap has widened to 18%, three times that of gender.

To explore the issue more deeply, I highly encourage you to check out the full results.