America now has more Republicans than Democrats

The end of an almost-century long era

Something very unusual by historic standards happened in this year’s election: there were lots more Republicans than Democrats in the electorate.

After the exit polls were reweighted to reflect the final popular vote result, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 5 points in the AP VoteCast survey and by 4 points in the network exit polls.

Historically, this is practically unheard of. Democrats have held a longstanding advantage in party identification that dates back to the New Deal, with Republicans drawing even on only a couple of occasions — the 1994 Republican Revolution and the immediate post-9/11 period.

Until Ronald Reagan remade the Republican Party’s image in the 1980s, Democrats held a massive advantage in party ID that often reached 2-to-1 in the 1960s and ‘70s. Only after Reagan’s 1984 landslide did the modern narrow Democratic advantage take hold, where it’s stayed for the most part ever since.

The historic Democratic identification advantage has been with us since the advent of modern polling and has been an inexorable fact of political life for the better part of a century.

This did not stop Republicans from winning their fair share of national elections during this period, including landslides like Richard Nixon’s in 1972, when he won by 23 points in a country that was Democratic by 17. This Democratic brand advantage did nevertheless manifest in a structural majority in Congress and at the state and local levels until 1994, one of the points where Republicans briefly overtook Democrats in party ID.

2024 marked a decisive breakthrough for Republicans: the first time in a modern predifential election where GOP identifiers outnumbered Democrats, rather than merely drawing even. But the end of this period where voters were more willing to call themselves Democrats than they were to vote for Democratic presidential candidates, probably ended in 2020, when the party managed to narrowly win a trifecta while GOP turnout was roughly on par with Democrats—behind by 1 in the exit poll and up 1 in AP VoteCast.

We are now entering a period where the roughly even party ID split reflects the highly competitive nature of national elections. All things being equal we should expect a 50-50 political environment to yield tied party ID, rather than a 3- or 4-point Democratic ID edge. Good Democratic years will mean more Democratic identifiers in the electorate, and good Republican years will mean more Republican identifiers.

Will this last?

The question that naturally will get asked next is whether this is a new equilibrium or a short-term mirage. After all, Republicans have drawn even before, only to fall back behind Democrats.

Partisan polarization is one big reason why now might be different. The “ancestral” Democrat who identifies as a Democrat and votes for the party’s candidates downballot while being a de-facto Republican federally is gradually becoming extinct. If you voted for Trump, you’re more likely to just call yourself a Republican.

Does the Republican advantage this year signal something more than a period of parity—but perhaps dominance? Trump is a cultural icon who’s provided a rallying point for young and minority voters to vote for a Republican for the first time. If he plays his cards right — restoring the sense of pre-Covid stability and normalcy, securing the border, and Elon-ifying the federal burecuracy — he could prove a transformational figure just like Reagan was for Republicans in the 1980s.

From an analytical point of view, two things can be true at once: Republicans did enjoy a short-term turnout boost thanks to the failure of the Biden Administration and the long term baseline has gotten more Republican. That neutral baseline is now parity between the parties or a one or two point Republican advantage.

The key tell here is the 2020 presidential election, where in a fairly “neutral” partisan ID environment, Democrats won a trifecta, winning the presidential popular vote by 4.5 points and in the House by 3 points. Both exit polls averaged out to a tied environment in party ID, a pretty good indicator of what the baseline was. Likewise, this year’s Pew NPORS poll, a high-quality survey conducted with tens of thousands of Americans to provide other pollsters with weighting targets, yielded an R+1 party ID result among adults.

The hard data aligns with the polls showing short- and long-term Republican gains. First, voter registration data showed voters switching and registering with the Republican Party at a torrid pace all throughout the Biden years. That reflects both the Democrats’ relative unpopularity under Biden and a long-term unwinding of the Democrats’ New Deal advantage in partisan identification and registration. The “stock” of existing voter registrations is more Democratic than these voters actually behave, particularly in rural areas. As people update their registrations, voters die, and new voters come online, the voter registration figures will gradually come to reflect the Trump era partisan alignment.

But there was also a Republican turnout surge specific to this election year. The strongest Trump 2020 counties outvoted the strongest Biden 2020 counties by around 10 percent. The reason the electorate was R+4 and not Pew’s R+1 was because of this surge. When we compare the actual 2024 turnout to a model trained on 2020 turnout, the split in party registration states is 2-3 points more Republican in 2024.

Predict party ID, predict the election

We are now in an era where party ID is closely coupled with election outcomes, with a slight Republican ID advantage. And for the first time in 2020 and 2024, the historic pattern of Democrats overperforming on ID reversed itself. Trump actually underperformed the Republican ID margin both times.

That makes having a realistic party ID mix in polls extremely important. And pollsters may have to take heavy-handed measures to achieve it. This is probably the subject of another post, but when all is said and done, party ID and not recalled vote is probably the only semi-stable partisan benchmark you can weight to that voters are somewhat truthful about.

But can you predict party ID and create a fixed target for it in your polls? If they want to avoid bias, pollsters increasingly may have to. Doing so may be a function of taking the party ID baseline and adjusting the margin up to 3 points for the political environment. If one assumes the baseline is R+1 today, the range of possible outcomes in an election is anywhere between D+2 to R+4, but in 2024 a pro-Democratic environment should probably have been ruled out, so that yielded a potential party ID range of R+1 to R+4 in 2024, and we ended it at R+4. The tricky part here, of course, is that the baseline itself isn’t stable, so you need to adjust it based on trends in high-quality surveys that aren’t weighting on party identification.

This is a slightly uncomfortable thought as it’s almost the equivalent of fixing the election result itself before the fact. But many pollsters already did a version of this by weighting to a recalled vote benchmark that turned out to be too far left, because more Trump 2020 voters turned out this year. Just making an educated guess at what party ID will be, or allowing your final party mix to trade in a very narrow band around this, might be the lesser of evils approach.