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Democrats hit Donald Trump and David Schweikert on reproductive issues - The Arizona Republic

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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

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Democratic legislative leaders have reached an agreement on a number of key supplemental budget fixes, including restoring pension tax breaks for retirees and an increase in pay for education technicians.

Senate President Troy Jackson, D-Allagash, met with Democratic leaders on Friday and reached consensus on several provisions, his office said Saturday.

The deal comes nearly a week after Democrats on the Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee voted to recommend a supplemental budget that removed $60 million from the states highway budget,rolled back tax relief for pensioners and reduced aid to dairy farmers.

The committees vote taken at nearly 3 a.m. on April 6 and overriding the objections of Republican members drew the ire of Gov. Janet Mills and prompted her to urge fellow Democrats to reconsider the ill-advised changes. Republicans criticized Democrats for making a significant change in the dark of night without public notice.

Jackson said the supplemental budget recommended by Democrats on the committee makes a number of critical investments in our state from housing and maintaining the 55% threshold for public K-12 education funding to support for victims of mass violence events.

However, its clear that lawmakers must also keep our promises on tax breaks for retirees, dairy farmers and transportation, he said in a statement Saturday. In addition, we need to take steps to bolster retention and recruitment efforts for state workers, protect funding for York Hospital, and raise wages for education technicians and critical school support staff. There seems to be a consensus on a number of key issues and an agreement for them to be addressed as soon as possible.

The provisions outlined by Jackson are expected to be taken up by the Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee in the coming days.

They include fully restoring the pension tax break for retirees passed last July. This would increase the annual income tax deduction from $30,000 to $35,000 for all retired Maine residents and include language to increase the deduction to the equivalent of the maximum Social Security benefit in the following years.

Jackson said lawmakers will vote to increase support for dairy farmers to at least 25% of the newly identified cost of production, an initiative that received unanimous support from the Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry Committee. It will benefit 146 dairy farms that participate in the program and 14,000 workers.

Lawmakers will have a chance to vote to increase wages for ed techs and support staff, and to support a new compensation and classification system that closes the state employee pay gap for executive branch workers.

Democratic leaders also reached consensus on protecting current funding for York Hospital. The hospital rate reform included in the current supplemental budget benefits most hospitals in the state but would result in the loss of critical funding for York Hospital. Lawmakers are expected to vote on language to ensure the hospital remains unharmed by rate reform and maintains its current funding level.

Lawmakers also will vote on whether to restore an agreement on roads and bridges that was recently altered in the supplemental budget. Last session, Democrats and Republicans worked together to find consistent funding for the chronically underfunded Highway Fund to ensure the safety of road and bridges, according to Jackson.

Mills presented two budget proposals this session in response to predictions from nonpartisan revenue forecasters that the state will take in $373 million more in tax revenue this year and next than originally anticipated. Her latest spending plan would increase the state budget to $10.41 billion, up from the current $10.3 billion.

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Democratic legislative leaders reach agreement on supplemental budget fixes - Press Herald

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correction

A previous version of this article incorrectly said the percentage of White voters who identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic in 2020 was 52 percent. It was 42 percent. The article has been corrected.

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 groups 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 Bidens 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 partys coalition has shifted from the mid-1990s to 2023. Since 1996, the share of U.S. 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 as 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 President Biden has substantial work to do in reassembling his winning coalition from 2020 this November. A February Pew survey found Bidens favorability rating among Latino adults fell to 37 percent, down from 44 percent last July, while Trumps favorability with Latinos 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-42 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 Trumps 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.

In another long-term shift, Republicans now hold a 25-point advantage among voters who live in rural counties, up from a six-point advantage in 2000. Democrats maintain a 23-point advantage among voters in urban counties slightly narrower than in 2016 while suburban voters have been closely divided since the turn of the century.

The survey found a modest gender gap, with women leaning Democratic by a seven-point margin and men leaning Republican by six points. Marital status appears to matter more: Married women were about twice as likely to lean Republican as women who had never married (50 percent vs. 24 percent), while married men were 22 points more likely to lean Republican than those who had never wed. Parents of children under 18 were also significantly more likely to identify as Republicans than those without children, regardless of voters age or gender.

Pew found continued Democratic strength among younger voters, with 66 percent of those ages 18 to 24 and 64 of those ages 25 to 29 identifying as or leaning Democratic. Those results contrast with recent polls suggesting that Biden and Democrats have lost ground with younger voters.

Polls of younger Americans attitudes can vary for a wide variety of reasons: Many are not registered to vote, the group pays less attention to politics, and they tend to be harder to reach in polls. Pew found just over half of voters under age 25 identified with either the Democratic Party or Republican Party about half instead said they are something else or independent, with 28 percent leaning Democratic and 20 percent leaning Republican. Other polls have found that younger Americans are more critical than older Americans of Israels and Bidens handling of the Israel-Hamas war that began in October, after Pews survey was conducted.

The Pew study also provided a detailed look at the degree to which religious groups differ in their political views. Republican identification was strongest among White evangelical Protestants (85 percent) and Mormons (75 percent), while Democratic identification was strongest among Black Protestants (84 percent), atheists (84 percent) and agnostics (78 percent). The survey found that Catholics overall leaned Republican by a 52 percent to 44 percent margin, a shift from recent years when the group was closely divided between the parties.

The survey was conducted Aug. 7-27, 2023, among 10,124 registered voters who are members of the Pew American Trends Panel, which was recruited through random sampling of U.S. households. The margin of sampling error for overall results is plus or minus 1.3 percentage points; error margins for party-leaning estimates from prior years ranged from 0.7 to 1.5 points.

Emily Guskin contributed to this report.

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Republicans close gap with Democrats on party identification, Pew survey finds - The Washington Post

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As more progressive Democrats implore the Biden administration to suspend its pipeline of military aid to Israel as a means of compelling a course change in Gaza, lawmakers and analysts say the law offers several tools for doing so.

U.S. leverage over Israel owes in large part to the $3.3 billion in annual security assistance Washington provides to the Jewish state, making it the largest recipient of American military aid. Israels growing isolation on the international stage fallout from the staggering number of civilian casualties and an emerging famine in the Palestinian enclave has only underscored the importance of its relationship with the United States, observers say.

The fury being felt by some lawmakers came through this week as they grilled senior national security officials during congressional budget hearings. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) lamented to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that we are the ones supplying Israeli forces with the bombs being used to destroy homes and hospitals and refugee camps.

The U.S. government provides an extraordinary amount of weaponry to Israel, said Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, noting that the Biden administration has authorized more than 100 arms sales since Oct. 7, including through emergency means that bypass congressional review. And so, he said, all of that gives the United States a lot of potential leverage, either by outright withholding or blocking transfers, or through the credible threat of doing so.

If President Biden wished to take such a step, he would not need new legislation. There are a lot of laws on the books, said Sarah Margon, director of foreign policy at the Open Society Foundations, that can be used to restrict and condition security assistance in whole or in part.

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Analysis | Progressives want to cut military aid to Israel. Here are the options. - The Washington Post

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