It is inevitable that political candidates are proxies for belief systems. They have to be; they are by design. A representative democracy is ideally one in which voters choose between politicians to identify the one they are most confident will make decisions that comport with their own. To serve as the voter’s proxy.
Particularly in the modern era, a lot of nuance has been leeched out of that framework. The choice is generally between two candidates, narrowing the theoretical likelihood of agreement with voters’ positions. Except that this is also a robustly partisan moment, in which voters often have and prioritize a set of common beliefs, making it easier for one candidate to serve as an effective proxy.
With that in mind, it’s interesting to consider recently published polling from Pew Research Center showing how wide the divide between partisans can often be. Respondents were asked in April how they viewed dozens of issues, most sitting at the nexus of culture and politics. Then those responses were matched earlier this month to their support in the presidential contest.
The result was an assessment of the partisan divide, a look at how supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump viewed questions of gun ownership, gender, government, race, immigration and policing, among other things. Pew’s team ran through the findings and provided a full set of data.
That allowed us to look at the results through a different lens, considering the issues included in Pew’s polling where Harris and Trump supporters agreed and disagreed the most.
This is admittedly a bit tricky, since the questions used different response options. Assessing the divide on some questions, like those asking respondents to evaluate how important an issue was, involved comparing the relative margins between those who viewed it as at least somewhat important and at least somewhat unimportant. In other words, your assessment of the differences might be different from ours.
That said, there were some issues on which the differences between the two parties’ supporters were stark. Nowhere was that more the case than on questions of gun ownership and regulation. Those questions yielded the biggest divides between Trump and Harris supporters.
Among the other five questions with the widest divides were one on race — the extent to which respondents believed that White people have societal advantages that Black people don’t — and the role of government. Again, these were the five issues with the widest divides among a set that included other obviously contentious issues, like immigration, abortion and transgender rights. Guns, race and government saw the biggest splits.
Where Americans agreed the most, there often wasn’t that much agreement. But most respondents agreed that in vitro fertilization was a positive and that police should respect the rights of criminal suspects. (There was another question that had overwhelming agreement: that police should try to keep communities safe. We excluded it below because, well, who’s going to disagree with that? Criminals?) Americans also generally agreed that a strong military and an active international role for the United States were appropriate.
But the question on which there was the least disagreement was a disheartening one: Both Harris and Trump supporters have about the same, pessimistic assessment of America’s ability to solve its intractable problems. Both on the left and right, most supporters of the major-party candidates think that America’s problems are unfixable.
That presumably includes the rampant partisanship robustly demonstrated elsewhere in Pew’s analysis.
