Fact Check What Demographic And Ideological Groups Are Most Assoc

Political violence in recent U.S. history has been driven by multiple demographics and ideologies: historically and through the 2010s and early 2020s much lethal extremist violence came from right‑wing and white‑supremacist actors, but several 2025 analyses and datasets document... Researchers emphasize that political violence spans the ideological spectrum, is concentrated among small minorities within larger demographic groups, and is shaped by age, regional context, and perceptions of demographic and cultural threat [4] [5]... 1. Who the data most often points to: right‑wing and white‑supremacist perpetrators For years multiple datasets and expert summaries found that right‑wing extremists — especially those motivated by white supremacy, antisemitism, and militia/conspiracy narratives — accounted for the majority of extremist murders and many high‑profile attacks,...

Scholarly and policy work stresses that these ideologies remain central drivers of much lethal political violence in the recent past [8] [2]. 2. The rising attention to left‑wing incidents in 2025 and contested interpretation Several recent analyses — notably a CSIS study covering early‑2025 incidents — report an uptick in left‑wing terrorism and plots, with some months in 2025 where left‑wing incidents outnumbered far‑right incidents, prompting debate among... Commentators and analysts caution that this increase is from a low base and does not necessarily equate to parity with the historical scale or deadliness of right‑wing terrorism [11] [2]. Pew Research Center’s annual National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS) has measured partisan affiliation among U.S.

adults since 2020. Explore recent patterns of partisan affiliation in the American public and among several key demographic groups below. This fact sheet shows trends in partisan identification among U.S. adults using data from Pew Research Center’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS). The most recent NPORS was conducted from Feb. 5 to June 18, 2025, among 5,022 U.S.

adults. We field NPORS to produce benchmark estimates for several topics, including Americans’ political and religious affiliations. The accompanying NPORS fact sheet provides additional detail about its methodology, including the questionnaires and links to the datasets. We also periodically publish reports that analyze partisan affiliation trends in more depth (including longer-term trends and additional subgroup analysis), based on data from Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel and historical trends from... The most recent of these reports – focused on partisanship among registered voters – was published in spring 2024. Today, Americans are about evenly split between the two parties: 46% identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, and 45% identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party.

This balance of partisanship is similar to 2024, but the current near-even division marks a shift from the affiliation advantage the Democratic Party enjoyed a few years ago. Received 2024 Feb 16; Accepted 2025 May 20; Issue date 2025. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate... You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from...

To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Has ideological polarization actually increased in the past decades, or have voters simply sorted themselves into parties matching their ideology more closely? Here we present a methodology to quantify multidimensional ideological polarization by embedding the respondents to a wide variety of political, social and economic topics from the American National Election Studies into a two-dimensional ideological... By identifying several demographic attributes of the American National Election Studies respondents, we chart how political and socioeconomic groups move through the ideological space in time. We observe that income and especially racial groups align into parties, but their ideological distance has not increased over time. Instead, Democrats and Republicans have become ideologically more distant in the past 30 years: Both parties moved away from the centre, at different rates.

Furthermore, Democratic voters have become ideologically more heterogeneous after 2010, indicating that partisan sorting has declined in the past decade. Ojer et al. use data from the American National Election Studies to map US voters in a two-dimensional ideological space. Democrats and Republicans have grown more polarized over the past 30 years, while partisan sorting has declined since 2010. The heated debate among political scientists over whether ideological polarization has intensified in America is still ongoing1–3. Ideological polarization refers to individuals having divergent beliefs on ideological issues, such as abortion or affirmative action4.

Some works conclude that Americans have moved towards the most extreme ideological positions of the political spectrum in recent decades5,6. Social media have been pointed out as an underlying root for this increasing disagreement7,8. Recommendation algorithms, in particular, are suspected to reinforce ideological segregation9, reducing engagement with information from opposing viewpoints, a phenomenon known as echo chambers10–13. Very recently, however, this hypothesis has been disputed, after observing that changing Facebook’s feed algorithm to reduce exposure to like-minded content does not seem to reduce the political polarization of users14–16. In 2024, conservatives and moderates continued to outpace liberals WASHINGTON, D.C.

-- Americans’ ideological identification was steady in 2024, with an average of 37% describing their political views as “very conservative” or “conservative,” 34% as “moderate,” and 25% as “very liberal” or “liberal.” However, this... None of the three main ideological groupings of Americans -- conservatives, moderates and liberals -- has had majority-level status since Gallup began tracking ideology with this measure in 1992. Rather, conservatives and moderates have been closely matched as the two leading groups, while liberals have consistently accounted for a smaller share. Still, the trend documents changes in the relative strength of each group. Gallup asks Americans to describe their political views on a five-point “very conservative” to “very liberal” scale, and the trend is based on annual averages of national telephone surveys conducted each year since 1992. The 2024 data include interviews with more than 14,000 U.S.

adults. A paradox defines American politics today: while a record number of citizens identify as politically independent, the nation’s governance remains firmly controlled by two major parties. This is a fundamental shift that’s been building for decades, signaling a deep disconnect between voters and the political structures meant to represent them. The rise of unaffiliated voters raises questions about the health of U.S. democracy. Who are these independent voters, and what’s driving their exodus from the major parties?

More importantly, what changes to the political system could address a situation where a plurality of Americans feel unrepresented by either party? The most significant change in American political identity over the past three decades has been the rise of the independent voter. Once the smallest of the three major political groups, independents now make up the largest political bloc in the United States. Gallup’s long-term polling data shows this dramatic transformation. Both major parties have lost shares of the electorate. By 2024, 43% of U.S.

adults identified as independent, while identification with both major parties had fallen to 28% each. Protesters gather at a rally to demonstrate against the LA City Council's COVID-19 vaccine mandate for city employees and contractors on Monday in Los Angeles. A new study from the Pew Research Center breaks down ideology within political parties, including by views on the role of government. Mario Tama/Getty Images hide caption Protesters gather at a rally to demonstrate against the LA City Council's COVID-19 vaccine mandate for city employees and contractors on Monday in Los Angeles. A new study from the Pew Research Center breaks down ideology within political parties, including by views on the role of government.

The idea that Americans are polarized makes it seem as if there are only two sides in politics — liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican. But Americans are far more complicated politically, a new Pew Research Center typology shows in a study that gives a clearer picture of the full spectrum of American political views. Americans are divided not just by party but also within them, enough so for Pew to sort Americans ideologically into nine distinct categories (one more than in its last typology four years ago, with... The typology groups at either end of the political spectrum, Faith and Flag Conservatives and Progressive Left, are also the most politically engaged – that is, they voted at the highest rates in the... The groups in the middle of the ideological spectrum have much lower levels of political engagement. This pattern is not new.

Pew Research Center’s 2014 study of partisan polarization found that “many of those in the center remain on the edges of the political playing field, relatively distant and disengaged, while the most ideologically oriented... This is often referred to as the “U shape” in political engagement. Voter turnout of the typology groups in the 2020 election largely fits this pattern: About 85% of citizens in these more ideological groups were validated voters in 2020 (86% for Progressive Left and 85%... Moving from either of end of the typology toward slightly more ideologically mixed groups shows a gradual decrease in turnout. Establishment Liberals and Committed Conservatives turned out at slightly lower rates (78% each), though both groups still participated at substantially higher rates than the overall population. Democratic Mainstays and Populist Right were somewhat lower still (68% and 67%, respectively).

Outsider Left diverge slightly from this pattern – while they are notably more liberal than conservative, and more liberal than Democratic Mainstays, they voted at a lower rate (57%). Ambivalent Right, a relatively mixed group ideologically, also had lower turnout (55%), while the very politically mixed Stressed and Sidelined turned out at the lowest rate (45%) of all the groups. Nature Human Behaviour volume 9, pages 2027–2037 (2025)Cite this article Has ideological polarization actually increased in the past decades, or have voters simply sorted themselves into parties matching their ideology more closely? Here we present a methodology to quantify multidimensional ideological polarization by embedding the respondents to a wide variety of political, social and economic topics from the American National Election Studies into a two-dimensional ideological... By identifying several demographic attributes of the American National Election Studies respondents, we chart how political and socioeconomic groups move through the ideological space in time.

We observe that income and especially racial groups align into parties, but their ideological distance has not increased over time. Instead, Democrats and Republicans have become ideologically more distant in the past 30 years: Both parties moved away from the centre, at different rates. Furthermore, Democratic voters have become ideologically more heterogeneous after 2010, indicating that partisan sorting has declined in the past decade. The heated debate among political scientists over whether ideological polarization has intensified in America is still ongoing1,2,3. Ideological polarization refers to individuals having divergent beliefs on ideological issues, such as abortion or affirmative action4. Some works conclude that Americans have moved towards the most extreme ideological positions of the political spectrum in recent decades5,6.

Social media have been pointed out as an underlying root for this increasing disagreement7,8. Recommendation algorithms, in particular, are suspected to reinforce ideological segregation9, reducing engagement with information from opposing viewpoints, a phenomenon known as echo chambers10,11,12,13. Very recently, however, this hypothesis has been disputed, after observing that changing Facebook’s feed algorithm to reduce exposure to like-minded content does not seem to reduce the political polarization of users14,15,16. Other researchers instead argue that the perception of widespread ideological polarization in American politics is exaggerated and primarily driven by the behaviour of political elites and the media17. They point to partisan–ideological sorting as a cause for the increasing divide between Democrats and Republicans, by which people sort into the ‘correct’ combination of party and ideology18. Over the past 40 years, there has been a substantial increase in the relationship between party identification and ideological and social identification19,20,21, and in the relationship between party identification and positions on a wide...

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