There are four main demographic groups which define American polarization and may help explain the results of the 2024 General Election, according to decades worth of election and poll data.
Presenting at the 2024 Elections Symposium, played host to by the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Brian Schaffner laid out the findings from Harvard University’s Cooperative Election Study, a 50,000-plus national survey that has interviewed more than 500,000 Americans since 2006.
Schaffner named the main polarizing groups in America–the “Big Four” – which account for more than half of the American population. The list consists of white evangelicals, Black people, LGBTQ people and secular people.
The groups are each large enough in size to be important to how elections turn out, and each vote overwhelmingly enough in one direction or the other that they polarize American voting, with white evangelicals overwhelmingly voting red and the latter three groups overwhelmingly voting blue.
“There are really just these four groups who are large enough and vote one side enough to really define our contemporary polarization,” Schaffner said. “There is sometimes a lot of overlap. So for example, a lot of Black people are evangelical, but Black evangelical people for us end up in the Black square because basically the Black identity overrides the evangelical identity. Black evangelicals vote about as democratic as black people who are not evangelicals.”
But it is the large, demographically diverse group of swing voters – the “Mosaic Middle” – who really determine the outcome of elections, Schaffner said.
“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. “Which side that group votes for is the side that wins the election.”
Schaffner also highlighted the significant developments in how party demographics have shifted over time, particularly in terms of religious affiliation, using data analyzed from exit polls since 1980 and election study data since 2008.
“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 said. “But you can see that divide begin to grow over time. And a lot of what’s going on there is that the secular population is becoming much more Democratic over time, steadily more democratic over those decades, and it’s becoming much bigger over time.”
Schaffner pointed to research that shows the non-Black secular vote in the Democratic Party is now a larger block than the Black vote in terms of accounting for Democratic vote share. And while Black people still vote heavily Democrat like their non-Black secular counterparts, the latter tend to hold much more liberal positions on issues than Blacks, who generally hold moderate views closer to the Mosaic Middle.
The data, Schaffner said, might explain why the 2024 election cycle saw more Black voters than usual voting Republican, though it’s too early to tell whether the 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 said. “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 policy tension among white evangelicals, who vary widely on specific policy issues despite heavily voting Republican.
But the data show Americans are actually more united on policy views than they realize. There are only four main issues that Americans are extremely partisan about: climate change, immigration, abortion, and crime. The Big Four are relatively united in support for congressional policies like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and views held by voters within all groups vary regarding things like foreign and economic policy.
“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.”
