Some people have suggested that this may be at least partially driven by Republicans who are favorable toward Biden choosing not to call themselves Republicans any more, as they see the party drifting further to the right. I think the opposite is happening, actually. Some data:
Sample sizes for some of these groups are small, so be wary of trying to infer too much, but our Economist/YouGov data suggest show that the Republicans who are favorable to Trump / disapprove of Biden might be the ones who have left; see the big increase in Trump-voting Indies.
If Trump voters are mad at the party leadership who voted to convict Trump and are shirking the party label — as the embrace of Trump's calls for a Patriot Party would suggest — then we would expect GOP opinion toward Biden to get _warmer_, not colder.
So, if anything, I think the polarization in Biden's approval ratings could be worse in reality than we're picking up in survey data. In other words, our increasing divides are not a product of weird anomalies in polling.
1 more thing 2 note: people who called themselves Republicans n January (a smaller group than those that called themselves Rep in Nov) also became less "strongly favorable" toward Trump after 1/6 (see chart). So I think we can be reasonably confident that the leavers are Trumpers
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
New report on faith in American democracy and elections from @BrightLineWatch
29% of respondents say they'd support dissolving the US into smaller, "like-minded" nations, including 50% of Republicans in the South and 41% of Ds on west-coast states
@BrightLineWatch I read a lot of polling data about how polarized and hopelessly divided many Americans are, but this report showing that one-third of people favor breaking up the nation is perhaps the most distressing
In terms of still having faith in "the people," it is reassuring to see that a clear majority of Americans still want their country to stay intact — but that's, like, kinda a minimum bar
Since Nov 2020, there has been a significant decline in the share of voters calling themselves Republicans, according to The Economist/YouGov polls. A monthly average of 42% of voters called themselves Reps before 11/3; today, 37% do. Capitol riot may have accelerated the trend.
This is the first sign I've seen that Republicans might need to take their de-registration problems seriously. Although there was a similar decline for Democrats after they lost the 2016 election, the trend didn't revert to pre-election levels until just before the 2018 midterms.
My prior is that Reps will stage a similar recovery over the next 2 yrs, but the post-Nov decline in GOP self-identification is the steepest I've seen in YouGov's data since 2016, so it could be different this time.
PS I'm not seeing any abnormal weights from non-response issues
We talk a lot in American political discourse about “tyranny of the majority,” but the real problem is the opposite: letting <40% of the population overrule the other >60% will probably not work out in the long run. (GOP Senators represent 44% of Americans but have 50 seats.)
Obviously, ther3 should be reasonable safeguards for the political minority. But more often than not the “tyrannical minority” has been made into a boogeyman for people seeking to impose minoritarian will over the rest of the people. Sadly, it has usually worked (for a while).
One thing people forget a lot is that America’s political and electoral institutions were built long before the idea of true majoritarian popular sovereignty was accepted by most people. That’s true even when the founders were restricting rights to white landowning men.
Lots of “mainstream” political strategists & consultants are wedded to poorly calibrated, ideologically-informed beliefs about what is possible electorally, and tend to read that into data. Seems to me that political data journalists have proved them wrong more often than not.
My point is that when we think about who tells “data stories,” there is a lot more of ‘x political journalists repeats y inaccurate, ideologically-driven belief about campaigns/elections” than “z data analyst tells it likes it is and is vindicated.”
Like, I and others got a lot of heat for saying that Dems would benefit, all else equal, from higher turnout, esp if 2016-2018 trends among whites continued. That is... exactly what happened in Georgia! It wasn’t data folks writing GA off, it was “insiders.”
Updated numbers (as of 2/8): So far in 2021, 0.6% of registered Republicans in AZ & PA have changed their party registration. For Democrats, it’s 0.2%. In other words, 99.4% of Reps and 99.8% of Dems have stayed with their parties. A little deceleration in the past week or two.
Net change away from the GOP is about 1/10th of Biden’s margin of victory in PA and AZ — and that overstates the danger to Republicans since most of these switchers are to NPD/Other and will end up voting against Democrats next time anyway.
The evidence Dems are presenting at Trump’s trial is pretty damn terrifying. A reminder of just how far radicalization on the right has gone. Some data:
- 20-40% of GOP partisans think violence is justified*
- Upwards of 15% might even *enjoy* it
It is totally fair to point out that Dems are about as likely as Reps (in polls) to say political violence can be justified. But we also have to acknowledge that only one side of the aisle stormed Congress to try and murder the VP and Speaker of the House.