Chapter 4
If you look at prominent figures, these questions are easy to answer. President Joe Biden is a Democrat; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is a Republican. Public officials run as nominees of one party or the other. But what about the schoolteacher in Connecticut, the textile worker in South Carolina, the farmer in Oklahoma, the computer engineer in California? Are they Democrats or Republicans? Who are the independents, and who represents them in government?
For generations, political scientists have found it useful to distinguish among the party in the electorate, the party organization, and the party in government. The party in the electorate is the voters; the party organization is composed of those individuals who run for and serve on, or who are employed by, party committees at the local, state, and national levels. The party in government is composed of public officials, elected or appointed, who are identified with one major party or the other as they serve.
We explore party affiliation in each of those three contexts. We will show how party in the electorate is a moving target. However defined, voters who identify with the major parties are easily distinguishable from those who work for the parties or run or are appointed as representatives of the parties.
Party in the electorate
How do you know if someone is a Democrat or a Republican? What does it mean to be a Democrat or a Republican? We know that party membership in the United States does not mean what it does in Europe. That is, Americans do not join a political party in any real sense; parties do not maintain membership rolls. We also know that party allegiance is the single best predictor of a citizen’s vote. Democrats, ceteris paribus—other things being equal—vote for Democrats; Republicans vote for Republicans.
The party in the electorate is normally analyzed in one of three ways. The first is to examine those who are enrolled in one major party or the other. This means is limited, however, because many states do not maintain official lists of party enrollees. If one says one is a Democrat in Maine, for example, it signifies that the citizen is enrolled in the Democratic Party and that the voter is eligible to vote in the Democratic primary. However, if that voter’s sister says she is a Republican in Wisconsin, the meaning is different. The state of Wisconsin does not enroll voters in one party or another; she can vote in either party’s primary. Because of state-by-state variation in the election law, party enrollment is not a very useful analytical concept.
The second method is to analyze those people who vote for the Republican or the Democratic candidate. This definition of party identification is in some ways the most meaningful; after all, we are concerned with election outcomes. Thus it makes sense to analyze how those who supported President Biden differed from those who supported President Trump in 2020. If our goal is to understand the result of a specific election, then examining the supporters of the candidates in that election makes a good deal of sense. But those who vote for the Democratic candidate for one office sometimes vote for the Republican candidate for another office. On a long ballot, voters might well switch back and forth between the parties. Furthermore, those who support the Republican candidate for a particular office in one year often support the Democratic candidate in the next election. If our concern is to understand which voters are Republicans and which are Democrats, voting behavior is also a limited tool. We hear often that more and more citizens are independents. On Election Day these voters are often faced with only two choices—a Democrat or a Republican. How can we understand their behavior if we eliminate them by definition?
As a result of these limitations, political scientists most often use a third mode of analysis, the concept of party identification, to examine which voters are Democrats and which are Republicans. Party identification is a concept that measures a voter’s self-assessment of their allegiance to one party or another. As such, it is different from either party membership or voting for candidates of a party.
Various polling organizations have measured party identification over the years. Commercial pollsters, such as Gallup, generally report how the electorate divides itself among Democrats, independents, and Republicans. The question asked is simple: “In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent?” (Asked of independents: “As of today, do you lean more to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?”)
For many years the Democrats had a significant advantage, with few voters declaring their independence from the major parties, especially when those who stated that they “leaned” to one party or the other were assigned to that preference. Between 2010 and 2019 the Republicans closed the gap between themselves and the Democrats, and more voters listed themselves as independent. During that time, small numbers switched from month to month, and party affiliation seemed to harden. In a Gallup poll conducted in April 2021, however, again when “leaners” were assigned to their preferred party, Democrats rebounded, leading Republican identifiers 49 to 40 percent. Whether this bump was pro-Biden and anti-Trump is unknown; it is noteworthy that the Democratic jump in 2021 was more than that in 2009, after President Obama’s first victory, and that the Obama jump did not last long. Political scientists tend to rely more heavily on the National Election Studies that have asked similar questions of voters in surveys conducted surrounding every presidential election since that of 1952. The National Election Studies question regarding party affiliation is, “Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an independent, or what?” Because these surveys probe far more deeply into respondent characteristics than do commercial surveys, they are far more useful in coming to an understanding of the electorate.
Party identification is useful in answering the question about who are the Republicans, who are the Democrats, and who are the “others” in at least two ways. The first is to look at various groups in society to determine whether members of particular groups tend to see themselves in one party or the other. The other means is to look at the party coalitions to determine to what degree specific groups contribute to each party’s followers.
Analyzing the affiliations of political groups
Political parties often appeal to voters based on their group membership. The New Deal coalition, the combination of groups that supported the Democratic Party after the 1932 election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was composed of White southerners, urban working-class Americans, especially union members, African Americans, Jews, and Catholics. The Republicans’ coalition was more difficult to define, but surely nonpoor Whites and citizens of small towns and rural areas made important contributions. That picture held for more than thirty years, but changes were clearly seen in the last decades of the twentieth century and have persisted into the twenty-first.
Some groups’ support for the Democrats clearly declined. The extreme example of such a group is native White southerners. Native White southerners identified with the Democratic Party in very large numbers until the 1960s. Although they might have opposed liberal Democratic policies, particularly on the question of civil rights, the Republican Party did not compete for major offices in the South until after the 1964 election, so White southerners had nowhere to go but to the Democrats. By the 1980s the allegiance of this group had changed dramatically; in the second decade of the twenty-first century native White southerners are much more likely to identify with the Republicans than with the Democrats.
Catholics were an important part of the New Deal coalition. Their allegiance to the Democrats was strengthened by the candidacy and election of John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic elected to the White House. In the twenty-first century, Catholics are only slightly more likely to identify themselves as Democrats than as Republicans; the Catholic vote was very closely divided in the first five presidential elections of this century, including 2020, in which the Democratic candidate once again was a Roman Catholic.
The situation with union members is complex. Union members in key Midwestern states defected to Donald Trump and were critical to his victory in 2016. In 2020, some of those workers came back to the Democrats, though active union members were less supportive of Biden than were retired union members. The allegiance of Blacks and Jews to the Democratic party has remained virtually constant since the late 1960s; however, African American support for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden was less than that for Barack Obama (an all-time high), and Republicans have begun to make overtures toward Jewish voters, claiming that Democrats are not as supportive of Israel as are the Republicans.
Some groups have emerged to be important in American politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that were not deemed significant a generation or two ago. Hispanics stand out because they will soon comprise the largest minority group in the nation. Currently the Democrats have a significant advantage in gaining the Hispanic vote. Hispanics favor the Democrats over the Republicans by almost three to one, though the percentage has varied from election to election. In part this variation is a reflection of competing group allegiance. Many Hispanics are also religious fundamentalists and regular churchgoers—two other groups not isolated for their political relevance in the past. Each of these groups heavily favors the Republican Party. Hispanics who fall into these categories, those who might favor the Democrats for other reasons, are torn. However, the Trump administration stance on immigration, opposed by most Hispanics, has hindered their efforts to make inroads into this group most recently.
The important questions about group allegiance deal first with why members of a particular group were attracted to a party as members of that group in the first place and then with why they continue to identify with that party, lose their allegiance but stay neutral, or switch to the other party.
Group allegiance forms because of policies put forth by political leaders of a specific political party. The New York Times columnist David Brooks made this point cogently in a column titled “Losing Alito,” published at the time of the Supreme Court justice’s confirmation hearing. Had Samuel Alito been born a decade earlier, Brooks asserts, he, like other urban ethnic Americans, would have been a Democrat. But the Democrats lost the Alitos of this world. Brooks wrote, “Democrats did their best to repel Northern white ethnic voters. Big-city liberals launched crusades against police brutality, portraying working-class cops as thuggish storm troopers for the establishment. In the media, educated liberals portrayed urban ethnics as uncultured, uneducated Archie Bunkers. The liberals were doves; the ethnics were hawks. The liberals had ‘Question Authority’ bumper stickers; the ethnics had been taught in school to respect authority. The liberals thought an unjust society caused poverty; the ethnics believed in working their way out of poverty.”
A parallel argument could be made concerning some groups that support Republicans. Establishment nonfundamentalist Protestants find the domination of their party by the religious right to be troubling; they think they have less and less in common with those running their party. And progressive Democrats in the twenty-first century may be repeating the pattern to which Brooks referred. Calls to “defund the police” do not ring true to many middle-class White voters whose allegiance to the Democrats, based on economic appeals, is threatened by what they interpret as left-wing attacks on the establishment.
The logical next question is why the parties act in these ways, a question we will return to in the discussion of party organization and party in government.
Party coalitions
Group contribution to a party coalition is a function of the percentage of those in a certain group who identify with a political party and of the overall size of the group. Thus, Jews are overwhelmingly Democrats but make up a very small percentage of the voting public and thus a small percentage of the Democratic coalition, approximately 5 percent. About three-fifths of all Democrats are women; here we see the much-discussed gender gap, as only two in five Republicans are female. Catholics make up about 20 percent of each party’s coalition. By contrast, Blacks and Hispanics account for about 32 percent of all Democrats, but only 14 percent of Republicans.
The party coalitions are also distinguished by region. Southern Whites now comprise one-third of all Republicans, but only about one-sixth of the Democrats. Finally, religious beliefs distinguish the two groups. A higher percentage of Republicans are religiously affiliated than is true of Democrats (79 percent to 52 percent); more strikingly, nearly one in three Republicans asserts that they are fundamentalist Christians; only 6 percent of the Democrats claim those beliefs. The contrast between these views of the two parties and the New Deal Coalition could hardly be more stark.
Since the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, the electorate has been more polarized than in the past. How citizens respond to Donald Trump defines that polarization. Republicans still support Donald Trump, believe his claims about fraud in the election, and oppose anyone—including fellow Republicans—who criticizes him. Democrats voted overwhelmingly against him, believe the election was fairly administered and decided, and applaud those who call for examining his actions as president in the aftermath of the election and leading up to the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
This polarization regarding President Trump carried over into partisan voting as well. Although many voters split their tickets (i.e., voted for one party for president and the other for Congress) over recent decades, in the 2020 election only one Republican and no Democratic senator won in a state carried by the presidential candidate of the other party; only 15 congressmen of either party (of 435) won in a district in which the other party’s candidate prevailed. Ticket splitting was far rarer than in many other decades.
The party organization
The Republicans and Democrats who populate their respective party organizations are self-selected activists. They are all but unknown to the general public. They attend committee meetings and plan campaigns. They draft platforms and do the nitty-gritty work of campaigning. Generally they are more concerned with local politics than with state or national politics. Partisan victory is important to them.
They are also the true believers in the party. Systematic studies of these party activists have reached similar conclusions. Whereas once party organization was synonymous with material incentives, in the contemporary context, those who run for positions in the party organization or who work for the party are more concerned with policy than patronage.
What policy? For the Democrats, party activists and staff tend to be more liberal than the average Democrat, more committed to traditional liberal Democratic policies and to the progressive agenda on issues such as climate change and income inequality favored by candidates such as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). For the Republicans, core activists tend to be more conservative. In recent years, this conservatism has been social conservatism more than economic conservatism. Evangelical Christians have made a concerted and successful effort to capture party machinery in a number of states and have made inroads in others.
If one assumes that it is possible to view public opinion on political issues along a spectrum from conservative on the right to liberal on the left, and if one further assumes that a normal curve defines the spread of public opinion on that spectrum, party activists tend to find themselves at the extremes, and rank-and-file party identifiers tend to occupy positions closer to the center. The more active one is in the party, the more likely one is to hold extreme positions, particularly on the most salient issues of the day. Thus, Democratic Party officers are likely to be more liberal than those who merely vote in primaries; primary voters are likely to be more liberal than Democratic identifiers who do not bother to turn out for primary elections.
One could certainly claim an inconsistency here. If a primary goal is partisan victory, then party activists should want their party to assume centrist positions because they would appeal to more voters and lead to victory. However, if one is a committed believer to more extreme policy positions, another logic holds: it is necessary to convince others that your position is correct, to control the party machinery, to nominate candidates who share your view, and to mobilize others with similar opinions to support those candidates in order to have those views prevail.
Certain consequences for the electoral system follow. First, the more influential party organization is in the process, the less likely it is that compromise positions will be taken. Second, the more one party dominates a geographic area, the more valuable the nomination is and the more potential candidates will appeal to the party base, not to the center. As a result, officeholders from one-party areas tend to be more partisan and extreme on controversial issues than are those from more competitive areas. Third, official party positions, for example, those taken in party platforms that are written largely by party activists, tend to emphasize salient issues on which the parties differ, not those on which compromise positions are possible. Taken together, then, one sees that the activists in party organizations contribute to increasingly divided and bitter partisanship.
Party organization in the golden era of parties, a century ago, was concerned with gaining power and the spoils that went with that power. Party leaders were often towering political figures. Those who worked under them were bound to them and to the organization because of the patronage they controlled. Local politics was more important than state or national politics, because more patronage was controlled at the local level. Party positions were decidedly secondary.
In the twenty-first century, party leaders are largely unknown except by other activists in their local area; they still perform the traditional party functions, but their motivation for supporting the party is because of policy preferences, not potential patronage. Party positions are not valued for personal gain. As a result, those who care most about policy are able to capture party posts and dominate the organizations.
The party in government
President Biden and Senate Minority Leader McConnell stand as obvious examples of politicians associated with their political party. When one refers to well-known politicians, those who follow politics even remotely can conjure up certain images. President Biden stands for a multilateral foreign policy and for expanding the number of people receiving affordable healthcare. Senator McConnell is associated with fiscal conservatism, opposition to campaign finance restrictions, stricter immigration laws, and a smaller government. The images may not be precise, but they are clear nonetheless.
How clear are the distinctions between Democrats and Republicans in office? To a large extent that depends on what level of precision you seek. A generation ago, even the most astute observers would have difficulty defining what it meant to be a Democratic officeholder. Democratic senator Ted Kennedy took an extremely liberal position on most issues. But Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama, who ran for president as a Democrat, symbolized southern conservative Democrats, of whom there were many. Washington State was represented in the Senate by Henry M. Jackson, a liberal on domestic policies but a staunch conservative on defense matters. During the Vietnam War, Democrat Lyndon Johnson led the war effort, with many allies in the Congress, including most Republicans; other Democrats led opposition to the war, along with a few Republicans. It was difficult to define where the party in government stood.
In the third decade of the twenty-first century, defining the party in government seems to be somewhat easier, at least at the national level. For each session of Congress, the Congressional Quarterly Service computes a party unity score for each representative and senator. In the most recent congresses, each party’s average unity score has been over 90 percent; the percentage of votes on which a majority of one party opposed a majority of the other has also increased. In Congress, generally one finds the Democrats supporting President Biden and Republicans opposing nearly all of his initiatives. Even when President Biden has sought bipartisan support for programs deemed favorable by most voters, Republicans have opposed him, not wanting him to gain credit for legislative achievements.
Some variation does exist if one looks at the state or regional level. In the Republican Party, as a clear example, party officeholders from New England tend to be moderate on social issues; those from states in the Bible Belt, the religiously conservative area in the heartland of the country, tend to be much more conservative. For much of the twentieth century the Republicans were a more homogeneous party than the Democrats; for a period in the early twenty-first century Republicans were split between economic conservatives and social conservatives. However, Republican officeholders united behind loyalty to President Trump and remained loyal even after his defeat.
This change can be seen around the issue of abortion. In 1992, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Robert P. Casey was not permitted to air his pro-life views at the Democratic National Convention. In 2006, his pro-life son, Robert P. Casey Jr., was sought out by party leaders to be their candidate for the US Senate. At the same time, the Republican Party is defined more as a pro-life party, with little divergence tolerated. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who equivocated on his stand on abortion rights when running for office in a liberal state, made determined efforts to stake out firmly pro-life positions when he decided to explore the Republican presidential nomination and subsequently as he has served as a senator from Utah.
Even with these variations noted, however, Democrats in government and Republicans in government are easily identifiable—and in fact go to great efforts to separate themselves. On issue after issue, when one party’s leaders take a stand, those of the other party take the opposite stand. At the national level at least, the issues on which officeholders from the two parties work together to find common solutions are few and far between. Partisan conflict is much more prevalent than partisan cooperation; divisiveness is much more common than a search for mutually acceptable solutions to pressing problems. Polarization in the party in government is as apparent as partisan polarization in the electorate.
The independents
In looking at who are Democrats and who are Republicans, we have not dealt with the residual group—who are the independents? For the party in government, that is easiest to answer: there are very few of them. When the 117th Congress convened in 2021, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine were the only independent senators, and no independents served in the House of Representatives. Bill Walker of Alaska, who left office in 2019, was the most recent governor who was neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Approximately 99 percent of the state legislators are also affiliated with one or the other of the two major parties.
Party organization for independents is oxymoronic. How can there be a party organization if there is no party? However, when independent candidates run, they do form organizations. Most of those are episodic, coming together for one campaign and then disbanding. They are the followers of the candidate, often following him or her for the same reason the candidate is running—concern for one issue or a set of issues, dissatisfaction with the established candidates. Occasionally such an organization persists, as did H. Ross Perot’s organization after his 1992 bid for the presidency. These followers might try to form a new party or to continue following the leader who drew them to politics. They—like those who labor for minor parties that have persisted over time—are dedicated to a cause but rarely influential in the process.
Independents in the electorate often determine the outcome of an election. They are not a unified group. Some are very involved in politics but choose not to affiliate with one party or the other, because their views are not in line with either party’s views. Others, once affiliated with one party, have become disenchanted but are not willing to move to the other side. Still others are interested in politics but disapprove of politicians who are too partisan to maintain their independence. Finally, a large group are uninterested in politics or government policy and do not identify with either party because they are not concerned enough to follow the discussions. Thus, some of the independents are among the most informed and most concerned of citizens; others are among the least informed and least concerned. Candidates must be aware of both groups and determine how to make appropriate, effective appeals. Making this judgment is often more art than science and based more on emotion than substance. Often, in the relatively few competitive races that do exist, those judgments separate winners from losers.
An increasingly polarized two-party system
Political parties are central to American elections, but party membership in any formal sense is alien to most citizens. Indeed, many have no formal affiliation; many do not even identify with one party or the other. Nonetheless, the concept of party remains important. Most citizens have an impression of the two major parties, of what they stand for, of what kinds of citizens think of themselves as part of each party. Even those who consider themselves independents most often vote for candidates who are either Democrats or Republicans—and they often do so because they have a sense of what it means to be a candidate of one party or the other. Candidates run with the support of party organizations. While they may seek independence from those organizations, none denies the role organizations play, particularly in recruiting candidates and in raising money in close races. In close races, party organizations also play crucial roles in ensuring that supporters turn out to vote. Finally, once politicians are elected, they organize themselves in governing by political party. Elected officials are identified by their party label and are thought to act in certain ways because they are Democrats or Republicans. An increasingly large number of citizens claim allegiance to neither party and take pride in their independence, but there is no evidence that these independents have discovered a third path into American politics. Rather, the American electoral system remains a two-party system, now characterized by extreme polarization, with Donald Trump as the figure defining the split between the parties—at the level of the electorate, the party organization, and the party in government.