The Democratic Party has lost its five-point advantage over Republicans as it has turned uber-liberal, according to an analysis of “hundreds of thousands of interviews conducted over the past three decades” by Pew.
In an extraordinary deep dive into its vaults of political surveys, the polling outfit revealed that since President Joe Biden stepped into the Oval Office, voters are nearly evenly split as his side has ceded some black and Hispanic voters and the economy turned against Middle America.
“In recent decades, neither party has had a sizable advantage, but the Democratic Party has lost the edge it maintained from 2017 to 2021,” the multipage Pew report said.
“The partisan identification of registered voters is now evenly split between the two major parties: 49% of registered voters are Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, and a nearly identical share — 48% — are Republicans or lean to the Republican Party,” Pew said.
“Four years ago, in the run-up to the 2020 election, Democrats had a five percentage point advantage over the GOP (51% vs. 46%),” Pew added.
A few things are to blame.
First, Pew found that partisanship and polarization is hurting Democrats more than Republicans.
“While the electorate overall is nearly equally divided between those who align with the Republican and Democratic parties, a greater share of registered voters say they are both ideologically conservative and associate with the Republican Party (33%) than say they are liberal and align with the Democratic Party (23%),” Pew said.
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And it found black people and Hispanics walking away from Democrats.
“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 Party’s advantages among black and Hispanic voters, in particular, have narrowed somewhat in recent years,” Pew added.