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In the run-up to the 2020 election, more voters across the country identified as Democrats than Republicans. But four years into Joseph R. Biden Jr.s presidency, that gap has shrunk, and the United States now sits almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.

Republicans have made significant gains among voters without a college degree, rural voters and white evangelical voters, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. At the same time, Democrats have held onto key constituencies, such as Black voters and younger voters, and have gained ground with college-educated voters.

The report offers a window into how partisan identification that is, the party that voters tell pollsters they identify with or lean toward has shifted over the past three decades. The report groups independents, who tend to behave like partisans even if they eschew the label, with the party they lean toward.

The Democratic and Republican parties have always been very different demographically, but now they are more different than ever, said Carroll Doherty, the director of political research at Pew.

The implications of the trend, which has also shown up in party registration data among newly registered voters, remains uncertain, as a voters party affiliation does not always predict who he or she will select in an election. But partisan affiliation patterns do offer clues to help understand how the shifting coalitions over the last quarter century have shaped recent political outcomes. During the Trump administration, the Democratic Partys coalition grew, helping to bring about huge victories in the 2018 midterm elections and a victory for President Biden in 2020.

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More Voters Shift to Republican Party, Closing Gap With Democrats - The New York Times

In a meeting with her staff last week, Vice President Kamala Harris offered a prediction: Former President Donald J. Trump would not support a national abortion ban. Instead, she said, he would take a position that would muddy the waters on an issue that she believed could be deeply damaging for his campaign.

We need to make him own this, she told her aides.

Days later, as rumors circulated that a court ruling was coming on Arizonas abortion ban, Ms. Harris instructed that an event in Tucson about student loans should instead focus on abortion rights, according to three Democratic officials familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal deliberations.

On Tuesday, Arizonas top court upheld an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions. And on Friday, before more than 100 abortion rights activists and supporters, Ms. Harris plans to deliver a simple message: Blame Donald Trump.

From campaigns for state legislatures to the race for the White House, Democrats have unified around a central message of protecting what remains of abortion access in the United States, along with the availability of long-established reproductive health measures like contraception and fertility treatments.

The Democratic effort underscores how the 2022 Supreme Court decision ending federal abortion rights remade American politics. Four years ago, Joseph R. Biden Jr. rarely mentioned abortion rights in his general-election campaign, fearing the issue could alienate moderate voters and would not sufficiently energize his base. Now, after the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion rights are a centerpiece of his re-election bid, the first time that an American presidential campaign has focused so intensely on womens reproductive health.

After largely abandoning an effort to brand economic progress under the banner of Bidenomics, the presidents team has found a simpler, easier-to-understand slogan to use wherever states are restricting abortion.

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Democrats Hammer a Simple Attack on Abortion: Donald Trump Did This - The New York Times

Thirty Years Ago This Week: While only a few people testified before the Colorado General Assemblys House Judiciary Committee on House Bill 94-1340 and the legislation was expected to pass swiftly through the House Appropriations Committee, two Democratic Party committee members were vehement in their opposition to the measure.

HB 1340 called for the addition of 2,700 new prison beds over the next five years, which would carry a fiscal impact to the state of $92 million for capital construction and $360 million in operation and building expenses.

Rep. Wayne Knox, D-Denver, one of the two Democrats who voted against the bill, said it was a lot of money poured down the rathole after previous prison spending.

It would be nice, Knox said, if we took at least half of that money and put it into prevention and intervention.

Rep. Dorothy Rupert, D-Boulder, who also voted against the bill, concurred with Knox. Rupert said that the House Judiciarys vice-chair Rep. Shirleen Tucker, R-Lakewood, told her that we would prefer putting the money elsewhere but prison overpopulation must be considered.

Tucker presided over the meeting because the committee chair, Rep. Jeanne Adkins, R-Parker, was the bills prime sponsor.

Among the few who testified before the committee was Clarke Watson of the Black Professional Businessmans Association who said, Latino and African-American males make up the bulk of prison populations.

It is rural economic development at the expense of people of color, Watson said, noting that prison facilities were primarily located in rural areas. The idea of building more prison space is terribly offensive.

Barry Frye, a former prison inmate and director of a youth program called Reconstruction, told the House Judiciary Committee that there was no rehabilitation in the prison system, and that this bill is just another emotional decision by legislations.

Twenty Years Ago: Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton returned to Colorado to formally mark the transfer of over 5,000 acres at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal from the U.S. Army to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Once the large-scale clean up was complete, another 10,000 acres would be added to the National Wildlife Refuge.

The Environmental Protection Agencys Superfund program had spent 12 years cleaning the contaminated site to ensure that the highest health standards were met to return the Arsenal for reuse as a wildlife refuge.

The Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge has a rich past and a promising future, Norton said. In celebrating this important milestone and the establishment of the Refuge, we also must remember the history of this site, its role in national defense and the valuable lessons learned here.

Norton grew up in Thornton and said that she remembered hundreds of earthquakes in the area which, as rumor had it, were the result of chemical waste being injected into the ground.

Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations and Environment Geoffrey Prosch said the Army was proud to turn the land over to the Department of the Interior for the public to enjoy its abundant resources for generations to come.

U.S. Senator Wayne Allard, R-Colo., who, along with U.S. Rep. Pat Schroeder, D-CD1, had sponsored the original legislation mandating the creation of the refuge, said it was an extremely exciting day for Colorado and the United States.

After twelve years I am proud to be here today for the transfer of this site, Allard said. We have taken land that had been contaminated by decades of chemical and incendiary weapons and turned it into a premier wildlife refuge. In doing so, we have set the standard for future reclamation projects across America.

Rachael Wright is the author of the Captain Savva Mystery series, with degrees in Political Science and History from Colorado Mesa University, and is a contributing writer to Colorado Politics and The Gazette.

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State Democrats call for crime 'intervention and prevention' instead of increased prison spending | A LOOK BACK - coloradopolitics.com

President Biden gestures after speaking about student loan debt relief at Madison Area Technical College in Madison, Wisc., on Monday. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

This week President Biden took his campaign to save his embattled presidency to Madison, Wisc., the capital of a state he is counting on winning in November.

The capital, sometimes known as "Mad City," is also home to the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin, the largest college in the state. Beyond the state government and education establishment, Madison has become a magnet for white collar occupations and a hard place for many recent UW graduates to leave.

Given the recent voting proclivities of younger voters and especially those who are current or recent college graduates, Madison and surrounding Dane County should be a trove of votes for Democrats. And indeed, they are.

Historically, Democrats have counted on running up big margins in industrial Milwaukee County, long a stronghold of organized labor and the state's most populous county. Dane and a few other populous counties were counted on in supporting roles. If a Democrat was to win statewide, these polities had to counterbalance the strong Republican leanings of the state's more affluent suburbs and farm towns.

But in recent elections, Dane has stepped out to sing lead. It is the quintessential example of a college-and-government population center that has become more than a trove of Democratic votes. It has become a defining feature of the party identity. It is not much of an exaggeration, if it is one at all, that college towns are to the Democrats today what factory towns were through most of the 20th century.

In 2020, for example, Biden carried Milwaukee County by about 183,000 votes over Trump out of about 451,000 votes cast. But he had an almost equal bulge in actual votes in Dane County, where he managed 181,000 votes over Trump out of a far smaller total of about 338,000 votes cast.

In midterm elections, such as 2018 and 2022, the role of Dane County's Democratic turnout has been even more dominant. And the same was true when Wisconsin elected a liberal state supreme court justice in 2023, making it possible to restore abortion rights and throw out Republican-drawn maps for state legislative districts.

So it made sense for Biden to be in Madison if he hopes to keep Wisconsin in his column this fall. And it is hard to overstate the importance of doing so for the president. In 2020 he managed just 49.6 percent of the statewide vote, but it was better than the 46.9 percent Hillary Clinton had in the state in 2016 and just enough to shade then-incumbent President Donald Trump who had 48.9 percent. Trump was only 20,000 votes behind.

Clinton's 2016 loss in Wisconsin had become for some the emblem of her fatal weakness in the Great Lakes region. Michigan and Pennsylvania also fell out of the "Blue Wall" that year after voting Democratic for president every year since 1992 even when the Democratic candidate was losing nationally.

But somehow Wisconsin seemed the unkindest cut of all. Polls there had shown Clinton's lead well beyond the margin of error. And Wisconsin had been voting Democratic even longer than the others, all the way back to 1988. Confident of Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign did not return for events in the state after the primary.

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Wisconsin's 'Mad City' is a rational choice for Biden's appeal to youth - NPR

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to explore partisan identification among U.S. registered voters across major demographic groups and how voters partisan affiliation has shifted over time. It also explores the changing composition of voters overall and the partisan coalitions.

For this analysis, we used annual totals of data from Pew Research Center telephone surveys (1994-2018) and online surveys (2019-2023) among registered voters. All telephone survey data was adjusted to account for differences in how people respond to surveys on the telephone compared with online surveys (refer to Appendix A for details).

All online survey data is from the Centers nationally representative American Trends Panel. The surveys were conducted in both English and Spanish. Each survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, age, education, race and ethnicity and other categories. Read more about the ATPs methodology, as well as how Pew Research Center measures many of the demographic categories used in this report.

The contours of the 2024 political landscape are the result of long-standing patterns of partisanship, combined with the profound demographic changes that have reshaped the United States over the past three decades.

Many of the factors long associated with voters partisanship remain firmly in place. For decades, gender, race and ethnicity, and religious affiliation have been important dividing lines in politics. This continues to be the case today.

Yet 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.

The combined effects of change and continuity have left the countrys two major parties at virtual parity: About half of registered voters (49%) identify as Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party, while 48% identify as Republicans or lean Republican.

In recent decades, neither party has had a sizable advantage, but the Democratic Party has lost the edge it maintained from 2017 to 2021. (Explore this further in Chapter 1.)

Pew Research Centers comprehensive analysis of party identification among registered voters based on hundreds of thousands of interviews conducted over the past three decades tracks the changes in the country and the parties since 1994. Among the major findings:

The partisan coalitions are increasingly different. Both parties are more racially and ethnically diverse than in the past. However, this has had a far greater impact on the composition of the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.

The share of voters who are Hispanic has roughly tripled since the mid-1990s; the share who are Asian has increased sixfold over the same period. Today, 44% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters are Hispanic, Black, Asian, another race or multiracial, compared with 20% of Republicans and Republican leaners. However, the Democratic Partys advantages among Black and Hispanic voters, in particular, have narrowed somewhat in recent years. (Explore this further in Chapter 8.)

Education and partisanship: The share of voters with a four-year bachelors degree keeps increasing, reaching 40% in 2023. And the gap in partisanship between voters with and without a college degree continues to grow, especially among White voters. More than six-in-ten White voters who do not have a four-year degree (63%) associate with the Republican Party, which is up substantially over the past 15 years. White college graduates are closely divided; this was not the case in the 1990s and early 2000s, when they mostly aligned with the GOP. (Explore this further in Chapter 2.)

Beyond the gender gap: By a modest margin, women voters continue to align with the Democratic Party (by 51% to 44%), while nearly the reverse is true among men (52% align with the Republican Party, 46% with the Democratic Party). The gender gap is about as wide among married men and women. The gap is wider among men and women who have never married; while both groups are majority Democratic, 37% of never-married men identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP, compared with 24% of never-married women. (Explore this further in Chapter 3.)

A divide between old and young: Today, each younger age cohort is somewhat more Democratic-oriented than the one before it. The youngest voters (those ages 18 to 24) align with the Democrats by nearly two-to-one (66% to 34% Republican or lean GOP); majorities of older voters (those in their mid-60s and older) identify as Republicans or lean Republican. While there have been wide age divides in American politics over the last two decades, this wasnt always the case; in the 1990s there were only very modest age differences in partisanship. (Explore this further in Chapter 4.)

Education and family income: Voters without a college degree differ substantially by income in their party affiliation. Those with middle, upper-middle and upper family incomes tend to align with the GOP. A majority with lower and lower-middle incomes identify as Democrats or lean Democratic. There are no meaningful differences in partisanship among voters with at least a four-year bachelors degree; across income categories, majorities of college graduate voters align with the Democratic Party. (Explore this further in Chapter 6.)

Rural voters move toward the GOP, while the suburbs remain divided: In 2008, when Barack Obama sought his first term as president, voters in rural counties were evenly split in their partisan loyalties. Today, Republicans hold a 25 percentage point advantage among rural residents (60% to 35%). There has been less change among voters in urban counties, who are mostly Democratic by a nearly identical margin (60% to 37%). The suburbs perennially a political battleground remain about evenly divided. (Explore this further in Chapter 7.)

Growing differences among religious groups: Mirroring movement in the population overall, the share of voters who are religiously unaffiliated has grown dramatically over the past 15 years. These voters, who have long aligned with the Democratic Party, have become even more Democratic over time: Today 70% identify as Democrats or lean Democratic. In contrast, Republicans have made gains among several groups of religiously affiliated voters, particularly White Catholics and White evangelical Protestants. White evangelical Protestants now align with the Republican Party by about a 70-point margin (85% to 14%). (Explore this further in Chapter 5.)

In most cases, the partisan allegiances of voters do not change a great deal from year to year. Yet as this study shows, the long-term shifts in party identification are substantial and say a great deal about how the country and its political parties have changed since the 1990s.

The steadily growing alignment between demographics and partisanship reveals an important aspect of steadily growing partisan polarization. Republicans and Democrats do not just hold different beliefs and opinions about major issues, they are much more different racially, ethnically, geographically and in educational attainment than they used to be.

Yet over this period, there have been only modest shifts in overall partisan identification. Voters remain evenly divided, even as the two parties have grown further apart. The continuing close division in partisan identification among voters is consistent with the relatively narrow margins in the popular votes in most national elections over the past three decades.

Partisan identification provides a broad portrait of voters affinities and loyalties. But while it is indicative of voters preferences, it does not perfectly predict how people intend to vote in elections, or whether they will vote. In the coming months, Pew Research Center will release reports analyzing voters preferences in the presidential election, their engagement with the election and the factors behind candidate support.

Next year, we will release a detailed study of the 2024 election, based on validated voters from the Centers American Trends Panel. It will examine the demographic composition and vote choices of the 2024 electorate and will provide comparisons to the 2020 and 2016 validated voter studies.

The partisan identification study is based on annual totals from surveys conducted on the Centers American Trends Panel from 2019 to 2023 and telephone surveys conducted from 1994 to 2018. The survey data was adjusted to account for differences in how the surveys were conducted. For more information, refer to Appendix A.

How we adjusted historical measures of partisan identification for transition from telephone to web

Previous Pew Research Center analyses of voters party identification relied on telephone survey data. This report, for the first time, combines data collected in telephone surveys with data from online surveys conducted on the Centers nationally representative American Trends Panel.

Directly comparing answers from online and telephone surveys is complex because there are differences in how questions are asked of respondents and in how respondents answer those questions. Together these differences are known as mode effects.

As a result of mode effects, it was necessary to adjust telephone trends for leaned party identification in order to allow for direct comparisons over time.

In this report, telephone survey data from 1994 to 2018 is adjusted to align it with online survey responses. In 2014, Pew Research Center randomly assigned respondents to answer a survey by telephone or online. The party identification data from this survey was used to calculate an adjustment for differences between survey mode, which is applied to all telephone survey data in this report.

Please refer to Appendix A for more details.

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How Party Identification of US Voters Has Shifted Since the 1990s - Pew Research Center