Two Opposing Developments That Changed American Politics

A pair of major developments in recent years — the ascendance of Donald Trump and the emergence of Black Lives Matter protests — have decisively altered the nation’s two political parties.

One key measure of this phenomenon is the growing disparity between the views of Democrats and Republicans on a wide range of groups — from the police to feminists to transgender people — as documented by American National Election Studies surveys.

The surveys asked voters to use a thermometer scale running from 0 (coldest) to 50 (neutral) to 100 (warmest) to rate different groups.

The researchers found, for example, that from 2012 to 2020, Democratic voters’ ratings of “feminists” rose from 59.9 to 70.9 while Republican ratings of feminists fell from 47.9 to 43.8. Over the same period, Democrats’ ratings of “Christian fundamentalists” fell from 49.7 to 39.3, while Republican voters’ ratings of this cohort increased slightly, from 80.3 to 81.9.

The sharpest difference emerged on partisan views of the Black Lives Matter movement. From 2016, when the survey first polled attitudes toward Black Lives Matter, to 2020, Democrats’ favorable rating rose from 66.3 to 76.9 while Republicans’ views fell from 30.2 in 2016 to 26.2 over the same time span. Put another way, the spread between Democrats and Republicans grew from 34.1 points to 50.7 points in four years.