"Democrats estimated that 44 percent of Republicans make more than $250,000 a year. The actual share was 2 percent."https://t.co/ALxNJImdu0
— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) June 26, 2018
The defining divide in American politics is probably between Republicans and Democrats. It encapsulates all our other divides — by race, education, religion and more — and it’s growing.
This partisan divide is such a big part of people’s political identities, in fact, that it’s reinforced simply by “negative partisanship,” or loyalty to a party because you don’t like the other party. A Pew Research Center poll from last year found that about 40 percent of both Democrats and Republicans belong to their party because they oppose the other party’s values, rather than because they are particularly aligned with their own party.
But what if Americans’ views of the parties, particularly whichever one they don’t belong to, are, well, kind of wrong?
