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How The Two Parties Have Changed Since 1992 — THIS CHART

The result has been gridlock and partisan vitriol like many Americans have never seen in their lifetimes.

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Pew Research Center surveyed registered voters nationally since 1992. The Democratic Party is becoming more diverse, less religious, younger and better educated than the nation as a whole, while the Republican Party trends the opposite way: whiter, more religious, older and less educated than the country overall.

Meanwhile Republican Party’s base has grown older, with the percent of 50 and older voters increasing by 20 points.

Republicans have made gains across lots of groups, according to Pew’s data, but interestingly, some of the biggest gains appear to be among groups that now support Donald Trump. Overall, 37% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters have a college degree today, up 16 points from 1992 (21%), and higher than the 31% of Republican voters who are college educated. Those figures have held roughly steady since 2008, but reflect a more Republican-friendly electorate than in 1992 (then 51% were Democrats or Democratic-leaning vs. 41% Republican/Republican-leaning).

College graduates have grown as a share of the population over that time, and have shifted increasingly toward the Democrats, according to the Pew analysis.

Subdivide that even further, and white men without a college degree have swung particularly dramatically. In 1992, 76% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters were white, 17% were black and 6% were Hispanic. Just 12% of Republicans are religiously unaffiliated, 9 percentage points less than the national average.

The demographic groups that make up those coalitions have shifted sharply in the last 24 years.

White women with a high school diploma or less have likewise moved far, but nowhere near the men.

Amid changes fueled partly by demographic shifts in the United States and partly by increasing polarization within those groups, a new report from the Pew Research Center finds America’s two major political parties look nearly nothing like they did a quarter century ago when Democrat Bill Clinton was first elected to the White House. “If he refuses to do so, Republicans will lose a lot more than the election in November”. Among Republicans and Republican-leaners, that change has been far less drastic, from 93% white in 1992 to 86% now.

For all that digging, there’s not quite a clear answer.

At the same time, the increase in non-whites among the Democratic coalition over that time stems largely from the growing numbers of blacks and Hispanics in the voter pool more than an increase in support for Democrats among those groups.

The Democratic Party that selected Hillary Clinton to be its nominee this year has a drastically different demographic profile than the one that chose her husband to top the ticket in 1992.

However, one important caveat: it’s not necessarily clear that Trump will do all that much better among these voters than Mitt Romney did.

It’s an argument, in fact, they say is working, pointing to a recent WTHR/Howey Politics poll that found Bayh leading by only 4 points, 44 percent to 40 percent. As Montanaro reported, Romney won 61 percent. Black Protestants make up 15% of all Democratic voters and Hispanic Catholics account for 6%; there has been no decline in the shares of these two groups. As we said above, the Democratic Party is growing more and more educated, with college-aged voters taking up a bigger and bigger slice of that party.

In 1992, the Republican Party was made up of somewhat younger voters than the Democratic Party. There has been no increase in the share of Republicans who are black; blacks made up 2% of all Republican voters in 1992 and make the same share of all GOP registered voters today.

Among Florida’s 2.1 million Hispanic voters, 39 percent are Democrats, 35 percent are independents, and 25 percent, are Republicans.

Since 1996, there has been a large increase in the United States of voters who do not identify with a religious group, from 8% to 21%.

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So as of September 1, 80 percent of the state’s 1.9 million black voters are Democrats, 16 percent are independents, and 4 percent are Republicans.

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