Participation and coalitions

Who votes, and who votes for each party, changed along education, income, race, gender, age and religious attendance, and attendance relates to the vote by different amounts inside different religious traditions.

8 written, 1 planned

A party's coalition depends on who turns out as well as on how each group votes, and a group's share of a party's voters can move in the opposite direction from the party's share of the group's votes. Chapter 3.1, Turnout establishes who participates, and Chapter 3.2, The two coalitions separates a group's vote share from its share of a party's coalition and from the population behind it. A place after the coalitions chapter is held for Chapter 3.3, Hispanic, Black and Asian voters (planned). The chapters that follow take education, income, gender and age one at a time, and each finds a gap with its own size and history. The part ends with religion. Chapter 3.8, The god gap in America treats attendance and affiliation as distinct comparisons, and Chapter 3.9, Religious tradition and race qualifies the pooled attendance pattern at once, because attendance relates to the vote by different amounts inside different religious traditions. Every chapter draws on surveys of individuals, so its claims concern people and the groups they belong to. Chapters on the South and on secularization in Europe are on the research agenda.

Chapters

3.1
Turnout
In the November 2024 Current Population Survey, 79.6% of citizens aged twenty-five and older with a bachelor's degree reported voting, against 39.1% of those without a high school diploma.
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3.2
The two coalitions
Voters with a four-year degree rose from 19.2% to 43.4% of Democratic voters in the ANES between the presidential elections of 1976 to 1988 and those of 2012 to 2024.
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3.3
Hispanic, Black and Asian voters
How did Hispanic, Black and Asian voters' presidential choices move between 2008 and 2024?
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3.4
The diploma divide
In the ANES, college graduates went from voting less Democratic than other voters to voting more Democratic, a gap of +23.3 points of the two-party presidential vote in 2024.
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3.5
The income ladder
In the CES the highest household-income bracket's Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote minus the lowest bracket's went from −9.1 points in 2008 to +5.7 in 2024.
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3.6
The gender gap in attitudes and votes
In 2024 women gave the Democratic presidential candidate more of the two-party vote than men did, by 8.1 points in the ANES.
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3.7
Age and generation
In the CES, two-party presidential voters under thirty were more Democratic than those sixty-five and older by +22.2 points in 2020 and +15.0 in 2024.
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3.8
The god gap in America
The Democratic vote gap between seldom and frequent attenders rose from 5.5 points in the ANES studies of 1972 to 1988 to 21.8 points in those of 2008 to 2020 and was 27.7 points in the 2024 CES.
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3.9
Religious tradition and race
In the 2024 CES, seldom attenders voted more Democratic than frequent attenders by +9.5 points among white born-again Protestants and by +0.8 points among Black Protestants, an interval that includes zero.
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3 further questions for this part are on the research agenda.