The big partisan shift

The Liberal Patriot closes its doors, population winners and losers, no rallying around the flag, why young men aren’t getting married, the Virginia early vote, deadlines work

No. 396 | March 27, 2026

📊 Democrats no longer outnumber Republicans in the electorate

YouGov’s deep dive into the Cooperative Election Study — which has interviewed 60,000 Americans in every even-numbered year since 2006 — shows a consistent decline in the share of the electorate identifying as Democratic, now down to a near-even break with Republicans.

This is a trend I wrote about right after the 2024 election, except that in exit polls, Republicans actually outnumber Democrats and have since 2020. But it’s good to have a longitudinal dataset with solid subgroup breaks on party ID to do this analysis on. These trends by group confirm that the trend has been consistent across generations, with all groups getting more Republican as they get older.