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Contents
The Public Mind

    Type to search. Planned chapters match by title only.

    Volume 1: The great sorting

    Part III

    The party coalitions

    Who votes for each party changed along education, income, race, gender and age.

    6 written, 1 planned

    This part asks who votes for each party and how that changed along education, income, race, gender and age. The income ladder and The gender gap in attitudes and votes are written. Each takes one axis and asks how the presidential vote or a set of attitudes differs across it. The planned chapters supply the frame around them. They ask how the composition of each party's voters changed, on which issues graduates and non-graduates differ, how Hispanic, Black and Asian voters' choices moved, what repeated surveys can separate about age and birth cohort, and who votes at all. Every chapter here draws on surveys of individuals, so its claims concern people and the groups they belong to.

    Chapters

    1. 3.1

      The two coalitions

      Voters with a four-year degree rose from 19.2% to 43.4% of Democratic voters between the elections of 1976 to 1988 and those of 2012 to 2024, and from 25.2% to 31.4% of Republican voters, and a group's share of a party's voters can move opposite to its share voting for the party.

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    2. 3.2

      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 in 2024 against +12.3 in the CES, while their differences from non-graduates on cultural, racial and immigration issues were already present in the 1990s.

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    3. 3.3

      The income ladder

      From 2008 to 2024 the highest income bracket's Democratic share minus the lowest bracket's went from −9.1 to +5.7 points, and by 2024 the middle brackets were less Democratic than either end, but within education groups the 2024 gap includes zero.

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    4. 3.4

      Hispanic, Black and Asian voters

      How did Hispanic, Black and Asian voters' presidential choices move between 2008 and 2024?

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    5. 3.5

      The gender gap in attitudes and votes

      In 2024 women voted more Democratic than men by 4.1 to 8.1 points, depending on the survey; the gap among voters under thirty cannot be told apart from the older gap; and party separates gender-role attitudes more than gender does in 3 of 4 surveys on the one item each asks; the World Values Survey is the exception, and it compares left-right groups because it has no party variable for the United States.

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    6. 3.6

      Age and generation

      Two-party voters under thirty were more Democratic than those sixty-five and older by +22.2 points in the 2020 CES and +15.0 in 2024, a fall that is detectable only among all CES voters, and repeated surveys cannot separate age, election and birth cohort without an assumption that moves the size of the age effect.

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    7. 3.7

      Turnout

      From 1994 to 2024 turnout among citizens rose with education and family income in every election and was lowest in the youngest age group; in 2024 it was 79.6% for citizens with a bachelor's degree and 39.1% for those without a high school diploma, and about 70% of that gap arose at registration.

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