Elections More Americans Identify as Republican than Democrat for the first time in 30 Years

[Madmick]

More Americans identify as Republican than Democrat for first time in 30 years, polling shows

As the countdown to Election Day ticks away, voter registration deadlines are starting to hit. A closer look at polling shows that, at the moment, more Americans identify as Republicans than Democrats.

It’s the first time in three decades the GOP has held such a lead.

NBC, Gallup and Pew polling all show the GOP advantage to varying degrees. An NBC pollster first noticed the shift in May and called it an “underrecognized game changer for 2024.”

NBC polls currently have Republicans leading by 2 points, with 42% of those polled identifying as Republicans and 40% identifying as Democrats. In 2020, Democrats led by six points.

This trend is also noticeable in swing states. For example, Pennsylvania has been losing registered Democrats for the past four years.

Since 2020, Democrats have lost 300,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania, while Republicans gained 50,000 registrations. In 2020, Biden won the state by about 80,000 votes.

As some Republicans start to feel these numbers mean momentum is rolling in their favor, Dr. Todd Belt, a professor and director of political management at George Washington University, urges skepticism.

“I think it’s really easy to overstate these numbers because one of the things we know is that the campaigns are going after a lot of independents and a lot are trying to get out their own voters … and so this is the field on which the game is played; this isn’t the game itself,” said Belt.

It’s also hard to gauge how much voter registration translates into actual votes for a party’s candidate since even permanent party switchers don’t always bother to switch their party registration.

A bit more about this relationship to election history from the WSJ:

Rare GOP advantage takes pressure off Trump to win over independent voters​

The development gives former President Donald Trump an important structural advantage in the November election. But other factors could prove more important to the outcome. Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris still leads narrowly in many polls, in some cases because she does well with independent voters.

Bill McInturff, a GOP pollster who works on NBC News surveys, first noticed in May that more voters were calling themselves Republicans. “Wow, the biggest deal in polling is when lines cross, and for the first time in decades, Republicans now have the national edge on party ID,’’ he wrote. He called the development “the underrecognized game-changer for 2024'..."

The last time that presidential Election Day exit polls found Republicans on a level playing field with Democrats in party identification was in 2004, when the two were tied. That was also the only year in about three decades that Republicans won the national popular vote.

“It’s definitely unusual,’’ Jeffrey Jones, senior editor of Gallup polling, said of the GOP advantage. Gallup says that party affiliation is one of several foundational factors favoring the GOP this year, along with its finding that Republicans are trusted more to handle the economy and immigration, which voters see as the nation’s most challenging problems.

Not all polls find the same tilt toward the GOP, and a lead in party affiliation isn’t a guarantee of success. In the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans turned out more voters than Democrats did in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan, according to the AP VoteCast survey of the electorate. But independent voters favored Democrats so heavily that the party won the governor’s races in all three states, as well as Senate races in Pennsylvania and Arizona. Democrats also benefited from an erosion of support among Republican voters for many GOP candidates who aligned themselves closely with Trump....

More recently, NBC’s September poll found Republicans with a 1-point advantage on party identification, and yet Harris led Trump by 5 points. Her lead rested on an advantage among independent voters and that she was winning more than 20% support among Republicans who don’t consider themselves part of Trump’s “Make America Great Again’’ movement, a group that ultimately could shift back to Trump

“It’s a loose indicator that you have a number of people who are disappointed in the Democratic Party’s performance,’’ Ruffini said. “It should be a good indicator for Trump. But as we saw in 2022, it doesn’t mean the candidates who are running are going to maximize their advantage’’...

L2, a nonpartisan company that collects and updates the voter lists from each state, says that more than 38% of U.S. voters are Democrats and 32% are Republicans, based on state records and its modeled calculation of voter preferences in states that don’t register voters by party.

And the Gallup itself (one of the major polling bodies mentioned in the articles above):

2024 Election Environment Favorable to GOP​

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Nearly all Gallup measures that have shown some relationship to past presidential election outcomes or that speak to current perceptions of the two major parties favor the Republican Party over the Democratic Party. Chief among these are Republican advantages in U.S. adults’ party identification and leanings, the belief that the GOP rather than the Democratic Party is better able to handle the most important problem facing the country, Americans’ dissatisfaction with the state of the nation, and negative evaluations of the economy with a Democratic administration in office...

In years when the advantage was narrower -- 2004 and 2016, for example -- Republicans won in the electoral college if not also the popular vote.

Party Performance on Issues​

Three separate measures of party performance on issues favor the Republican Party by at least a modest margin.

By 46% to 41%, Americans say the Republican Party is better able than the Democratic Party to address what they think is the most important problem facing the country. The top issues Americans currently name as the most important are ones that tend to favor the GOP, including the economy (24%), immigration (22%), the government (17%) and inflation (15%).

On the major issues-- perhaps explaining the shift:

Relationship to electoral history as a line graph:

As we've seen in recent decades, especially recent years, as some of those articles highlight, the new truly vital American battleground is over American independents, who are the fastest growing group with more relaxed polling of self-identification. But those numbers don't reflect some overwhelming drop. We're still talking about over 80% of the respondents identifying with one of the two major parties, not the swollen 40% figures of "unaffiliated" voters we've seen in some surveys in recent years.

Carville looms.

 

[Rob Battisti]

If democrats dropped the insane cultural stuff from their party I think they’d dominate every election.

Things like the trans movement, ignoring biology, pushing sexual things on kids makes people drop them no matter what good ideas they may have.

 

[nostradumbass]

If democrats dropped the insane cultural stuff from their party I think they’d dominate every election.

Things like the trans movement, ignoring biology, pushing sexual things on kids makes people drop them no matter what good ideas they may have.

Except that's basically all the party is now. They've certainly pushed normal people away faster with their race hatred and pushing their sexual perversions on children, but the 2 biggest issues for voters currently are their mass 3rd world migration and their economic failures.

 

[HOLA]

If democrats dropped the insane cultural stuff from their party I think they’d dominate every election.

Things like the trans movement, ignoring biology, pushing sexual things on kids makes people drop them no matter what good ideas they may have.

Do you feel Kamala Harris is personally emblematic or responsible for this culture war stuff you are focused on? Does she ignore basic biology more than her opponent? Does she push "sexual things" on kids more than her opponent? Or pushes "trans movement" related stuff more than her opponent?

 

[Barteh]

No surprise given the directions both parties have moved over the last decade.

Dems are running their most radical candidate ever who wasn't even elected in a primary, while the republicans are running someone moderate who used to be a NYC democrat 3 decades ago.

 

[Teppodama]

Do you feel Kamala Harris is personally emblematic or responsible for this culture war stuff you are focused on? Does she ignore basic biology more than her opponent? Does she push "sexual things" on kids more than her opponent? Or pushes "trans movement" related stuff more than her opponent?

If Trump is going to be held accountable for the sins of the Right then Kamala gets to carry those of the Left.

 

[cottagecheesefan]

If democrats dropped the insane cultural stuff from their party I think they’d dominate every election.

Things like the trans movement, ignoring biology, pushing sexual things on kids makes people drop them no matter what good ideas they may have.

Their positions on crime, immigration, even climate are clearly retarded. Even if climate is an issue, their approach and the evidence they use is retarded. Miami should already be under water according to them, and China and India are producing more emissions than ever before, the world producing like double what was being produced in 2000.

I don’t know what good ideas they have at this point. They dropped any sense of direction and blindly follow these wrong, progressively wrong ideas.

GOP isn’t much better, and by nature of their party, don’t have a strong platform as a party itself, which allows a lot of bullshitters into the fold.

For better or worse, the trump era has gotten people paying more attention, so whatever

 

[Zazen]

Lmao this country is so fucked. The rhetoric on the right is just getting worse and worse. At recent rallies Trump is saying “ they just have bad genes” and “ we must get rid of these animals” with a person in the audience screaming “kill them”. Republicans offer nothing but they’re just loud and consistent on messaging. Even when it comes to the economy. Historically dems are better but the right has Americans thinking the right is better on this . Sigh…. If Trump wins I think we deserve every bad thing coming our way.

 

[HOLA]

"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?"

"Hillary wanted to put up wind. Wind. If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer, you tell me that one, okay?"

“I see again the forest fires are starting. They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”

.....


I dunno guys I just don't think I can vote for Kamala. I don't think she understands basic science and that's very important to me.

 

[HOLA]

If Trump is going to be held accountable for the sins of the Right then Kamala gets to carry those of the Left.

Trump's being held accountable (or at least some people are trying) for his own sins.

 

[TadDunbar]

Democrats have been jumping the shark lately. No surprise.

 

[Barteh]

"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?"

"Hillary wanted to put up wind. Wind. If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer, you tell me that one, okay?"

“I see again the forest fires are starting. They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”

.....


I dunno guys I just don't think I can vote for Kamala. I don't think she understands basic science and that's very important to me.

Honestly kinda impressive how much BS you have ready to copy and paste to show off your TDS in every thread.

 

[HOLA]

Lmao this country is so fucked. The rhetoric on the right is just getting worse and worse. At recent rallies Trump is saying “ they just have bad genes” and “ we must get rid of these animals” with a person in the audience screaming “kill them”. Republicans offer nothing but they’re just loud and consistent on messaging. Even when it comes to the economy. Historically dems are better but the right has Americans thinking the right is better on this . Sigh…. If Trump wins I think we deserve every bad thing coming our way.

Even Trump thinks Democrats are better with the economy!

 

[tastaylvr]

Lmao this country is so fucked. The rhetoric on the right is just getting worse and worse. At recent rallies Trump is saying “ they just have bad genes” and “ we must get rid of these animals” with a person in the audience screaming “kill them”. Republicans offer nothing but they’re just loud and consistent on messaging. Even when it comes to the economy. Historically dems are better but the right has Americans thinking the right is better on this . Sigh…. If Trump wins I think we deserve every bad thing coming our way.

Your argument in a nut shell

“China and India are killing the world so I will too”

 

[HOLA]

Honestly kinda impressive how much BS you have ready to copy and paste to show off your TDS in every thread.

Trump's own quotes are bullshit?

 

[Zazen]

Honestly kinda impressive how much BS you have ready to copy and paste to show off your TDS in every thread.

How is it unfit to acknowledge reality? People who pay attention to what Trump does and says know how terrible he is for this country. People like Roger stone who he personally pardoned are already saying they plan to steal the election. Vance can’t answer whether Trump lost in interviews he’s had. It’s not like the economy is doing that bad. We’re in a much better position than most other nations. It’s just insane to me that people are okay with electing a wannabe dictator. Economies go up and down but once a country loses its values and democracy it doesn’t come back

 

[The Diplomat]

If democrats dropped the insane cultural stuff from their party I think they’d dominate every election.

Things like the trans movement, ignoring biology, pushing sexual things on kids makes people drop them no matter what good ideas they may have.

It's true. Democrats beat Republicans on just about every issue except for progressive things like identity politics and immigration. The problem is that the younger progressive wing is growing, and democrats are afraid of alienating that section.

I say force the moderate views, just like Biden. If progressives would rather sit it out than vote for Kamala, it's on them.

 

[Zazen]

Your argument in a nut shell

“China and India are killing the world so I will too”

Please don’t post when you’re drunk

 

[Barteh]

How is it unfit to acknowledge reality? People who pay attention to what Trump does and says know how terrible he is for this country. People like Roger stone who he personally pardoned are already saying they plan to steal the election. Vance can’t answer whether Trump lost in interviews he’s had. It’s not like the economy is doing that bad. We’re in a much better position than most other nations. It’s just insane to me that people are okay with electing a wannabe dictator. Economies go up and down but once a country loses its values and democracy it doesn’t come back

The thing is nobody but brainwashed Russian puppets believe any of these narratives. Which is why the democrat support is shrinking so rapidly, they have no platform besides some made up orange man bad stuff.

 

[Osculater]

I identify as ultra-orthodox alt-right