Issue Sorting & Geography

The issue-level sorting

The contemporary American partisan coalitions have sorted on an internally consistent set of issue positions. The 2024 cross-issue partisan gaps from this book's chapters:

Of the fifteen items in Table 1, eleven show partisan gaps of 30 points or more. Of those eleven, two run in the Republican-favorable direction (homosex always wrong, military spending) and nine in the Democratic-favorable direction. The directional asymmetry is real: contemporary partisan gaps on social-spending and cultural-attribution questions are much wider than partisan gaps on traditional fiscal questions. Whatever the contemporary American political divide is about, it is more about race, gender, environment, science, and culture than it is about the size of government per se.

The geographic dimension (referenced, not evidenced)

The proposal that became this book called out the geographic dimension as a major axis: "Regional patterns: Southern whites realigned first; Rust Belt whites more recent." The GSS catalog this book is built on does not include a full state-by-state or even nine-Census-region breakdown for the major partisan-identification variable. The catalog has East and MidWest as Census-region labels, which is not enough to evidence the Southern realignment story directly.

For that finding the book has to defer to the broader political-science literature: the Southern realignment of White voters from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party is the most-studied geographic realignment in American political science. Key references: V. O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949) established the mid-century Solid South baseline; Earl and Merle Black's The Rise of Southern Republicans (2002) documented the post-1960s transition; Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels's Democracy for Realists (2016) updated the regional analysis with contemporary data. The Rust Belt realignment of the post-2010 period — primarily White, primarily non-college, primarily in the upper Midwest — is younger as a documented phenomenon. Joshua Cohen's reporting in the New York Times and The Atlantic during 2016-2020 covered the contemporary leg; Justin Gest's The New Minority (2016) documented its psychological and cultural dimensions.

The book's GSS-based evidence is consistent with these geographic findings — the 35-point White-voter realignment of §10 is the aggregate signal that the regional analyses break down into geographic components — but cannot itself evidence the geographic distribution of the realignment.

The "issue mix" of each coalition

A point this book has documented repeatedly across chapters: the contemporary partisan coalitions hold internally consistent positions across the issue domains the GSS tracks, in a way the 1974 coalitions did not. The 1974 Democratic Party contained substantial Conservative-Democrat voters who were pro-life, anti-civil-rights-expansion, and pro-military. The 1974 Republican Party contained substantial Liberal-Republican voters who were pro-environment, pro-women's-rights, and pro-civil-rights. Those cross-pressured voters provided the mechanism by which the two parties could agree on substantive legislation. They are gone.

The 2024 Democratic coalition is broadly pro-environment, pro-science, pro-spending-on-disadvantaged-groups, pro-civil-rights, pro-LGBTQ-rights, and (lately) skeptical of police force. The 2024 Republican coalition is broadly anti-spending (except on the military), more skeptical of structural explanations for inequality, more conservative on sexual morality, more permissive of police use of force, more pro-military, and more anti-foreign-aid. There are still moderate Democrats who agree with some Republican positions, and moderate Republicans who agree with some Democratic positions, but the typical voter in each coalition is now well-represented by their party's platform.

The mixed-axis cases

Three findings in the book that complicate the clean partisan-sorting story.

Education and abortion. The chapter on abortion (§4.1) found that the 2024 partisan gap on the lead variable (legal abortion for any reason) is 40 points — but the attendance gap (weekly church attenders vs. rarely-attenders) is roughly the same size. On this specific item, religion is at least as important as party.

The work-hard / hard-work-belief reversal. The chapter on social trust (§6) found that the contemporary partisan gap on the "hard work is most important for getting ahead" question runs in the Republican direction (Reps more endorsing) — but the income gradient on the same question runs in the opposite direction within the Democratic coalition. The richest Democrats are the least likely to cite hard work; the poorest Republicans are the most likely to. The dispositional question is more about psychological frame than about experience.

The 2024 financial-satisfaction flip. The chapter on life satisfaction (§7.1) found that the partisan order on "satisfied with my financial situation" flipped from R+11 in 2018 (Trump) to R−1 in 2024 (Biden). The presidential-control effect on this variable is large enough that the variable is not a clean measure of underlying economic well-being. Partisan motivated perception turns out to matter on lived-experience questions as much as it matters on political-attitude questions.

These three findings each show that the simple partisan-sorting argument is not exhaustive. The contemporary partisan coalitions have sorted on most issues, but other axes — religion, income, presidential control, demographic composition — also matter, and on specific items those axes are larger than party.

What this chapter changes

Two observations to carry into the remaining chapters of Part V.

First, the issue-level sorting is consistent across domains. On the eleven items where the 2024 partisan gap is 30+ points, the partisan order is internally consistent: Democrats are together more confident in science, more pro-environment, more anti-defense-spending, more pro-civil-rights, more pro-LGBTQ-rights. Republicans are together the inverse. The contemporary Democratic and Republican Party voters do not contain meaningful sub-coalitions that disagree with their own party on the chapter-by-chapter issue findings.

Second, the GSS catalog has limits on geography. The book's central data source does not let us evidence the Southern or Rust Belt regional realignments directly. The aggregate White-voter realignment (§10) is the GSS's signal; the geographic distribution must be taken from the literature. This is a limitation worth flagging for readers who want to follow the geographic dimension further — the next-best primary source is the American National Election Studies (ANES), which has finer geographic coding.

The next chapter — §14 — turns from the partisan-sorting axis to the question of whether the standard left-right dimension is even the right way to describe the contemporary American political space. There are several variables in the GSS where the left-right axis does not predict positions well, and where multiple dimensions seem to be operating simultaneously.