Dec 6, 2024 Story by: Editor
The 2024 General Election is shaped by four key demographic groups that highlight American polarization, as indicated by decades of election and polling data. At the 2024 Elections Symposium hosted by the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Brian Schaffner presented findings from Harvard University’s Cooperative Election Study. This extensive survey, which has interviewed over 500,000 Americans since 2006, reveals critical insights into the political landscape.
Schaffner identified what he calls the “Big Four” groups that contribute to the nation’s political divide, comprising white evangelicals, Black Americans, and secular people. These groups collectively represent more than half of the U.S. population and significantly influence election outcomes due to their voting patterns. White evangelicals predominantly lean Republican, while the other three groups—Black Americans, and secular people—tend to vote Democratic, intensifying political polarization.
“There are really just these four groups who are large enough and vote one side enough to really define our contemporary polarization,” Schaffner explained. He also highlighted that overlap exists within these groups. For instance, Black Americans can be evangelical, but Black evangelicals are grouped with Black people in the study since their racial identity often supersedes religious affiliation. Notably, Black evangelicals vote similarly to Black individuals who do not identify as evangelical, both favoring Democratic candidates.
However, Schaffner pointed out that the outcome of elections is often determined by the “Mosaic Middle,” a diverse group of swing voters. “The big four really do define American polarization and have done so for the last few decades, but who wins and loses is driven by the Mosaic Middle–that’s your swing vote in elections,” Schaffner said. The group’s political leanings are crucial to the final result of an election.
The presentation also addressed shifts in party demographics, particularly regarding religious affiliation, by analyzing data from exit polls since 1980 and election studies from 2008 onward. “If you go all the way back to 1980, there’s really not much of a religious divide in terms of how people are voting. So people who identify as atheist or agnostic in 1980 are about 50-50 between Reagan and Carter,” Schaffner noted. Over time, however, the secular population has increasingly aligned with the Democratic Party, growing in both size and political influence.
According to Schaffner, secular Democrats now form a larger bloc than Black voters within the party. While Black Americans continue to vote overwhelmingly Democratic, secular individuals tend to adopt more liberal positions on issues, whereas Black voters generally hold more moderate views closer to the Mosaic Middle. This may explain the uptick in Black voters supporting Republican candidates during the 2024 election cycle, though Schaffner stressed that it is too early to determine if this shift is permanent.
“One of the tensions that the rise of the secular group in the Democratic Party has created is that you have this very liberal group of individuals who are very engaged in politics and then you have Black people, also a big part of the party who are more moderate on the policies,” Schaffner explained. “And so there is a little bit of policy tension between those groups, and I think we’ve started to see that emerge in the last few years.”
There is also ongoing policy tension among white evangelicals, who, despite overwhelmingly supporting the Republican Party, show varying views on specific issues.
Interestingly, Schaffner observed that Americans are more united on policy matters than commonly believed. The primary areas of extreme partisanship remain climate change, immigration, abortion, and crime. The Big Four groups also show significant agreement on issues like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, while their views diverge on topics such as foreign and economic policies.
“We spend a lot of time reading stories about how we’re different on everything with the gender gap, with the generation divide, with the rural-urban divide, etcetera, etcetera,” Schaffner said. “But on most of our social identities, we’re not that different at all… it’s true that there are some important identities that divide us, but we actually look a lot like the other side on lots of other identities.” Source: The Center Square
