One Country, Two Americas: The Numbers Behind A Nation That Increasingly Cannot Stand Itself

WASHINGTON — Start with what happened on Tuesday, because it is the phenomenon in miniature. Democrats flipped Senate seats in Texas and Kansas and South Carolina; they took one in Maine that Republicans had held for a generation; states voted in blocs, the same tide running through red states and blue ones at once. America did not split its ticket so much as it picked a side, nationally, all at the same time. Political scientists have a word for the condition underneath that map — polarization — and unlike most political words, this one comes with thirty years of measurements attached.

From Disagreement To Dislike

The Pew Research Center has asked Americans how they feel about the other party since the 1990s, and the baseline is almost unrecognisable. In 1994, 21 percent of Republicans and 17 percent of Democrats said they viewed the opposing party “very unfavourably.” By 2022, those figures were 62 percent of Republicans and 54 percent of Democrats — outright majorities of both parties, expressing not disagreement but hostility toward the other side as an institution. The trend did not pause for either party’s victories or defeats. It rose under presidents of both parties, in good economies and bad.

It Is No Longer About Policy

The sharper change is in what partisans say about each other as people. In 2016, 47 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of Democrats told Pew that members of the other party were more immoral than other Americans. Six years later, in 2022, the figures were 72 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats. Seventy-two percent of Republicans and 64 percent of Democrats said the other side’s people are more dishonest than other Americans. Eighty-three percent of Democrats described Republicans as more closed-minded; 69 percent of Republicans said the same of Democrats. Researchers call this affective polarization — the measure of how much partisans dislike and distrust one another, as distinct from how far apart their policy positions sit. By that measure, the United States has been setting records for a decade: the dislike has grown faster than the disagreement.

The Middle Emptied Out

The disagreement, though, has grown too. Pew’s long-running ideological consistency scale tracks where each party’s typical voter sits. In 1994, 23 percent of Republicans were more liberal than the median Democrat, and 17 percent of Democrats were more conservative than the median Republican — the two parties overlapped so much that a quarter of one party stood on the other side of the other party’s centre. By 2017, those overlaps had collapsed to 1 percent and 3 percent. Across ten political values questions Pew has asked since 1994, the average gap between the parties’ answers widened from 15 percentage points to 36. There is no longer a meaningful group of voters standing between the two coalitions; the coalitions themselves have sorted — by education, by geography, by whether a voter lives in a city or outside one — into two camps that increasingly experience different economies, different media and different facts. Pew’s 2024 study of the parties’ coalitions adds the demographic frame: the divide now runs most sharply along education and density, with college graduates and city voters leaning Democratic and non-college and rural voters leaning Republican, more sharply than in the 1990s.

Against, Not For

Perhaps the most consequential finding is about motivation. Pew asked partisans in 2022 why they affiliate with their party. Seventy-eight percent of Republicans said a major reason was the harm caused by Democratic policies — slightly more than the 76 percent who cited the benefits of their own party’s policies. Among Democrats the figures were level, 68 percent and 68 percent. Among the independent leaners both parties depend on, the imbalance is stark: Republican leaners cited the harm of Democratic policies over the benefits of Republican ones by 57 percent to 39 percent, and Democratic leaners by 55 percent to 27 percent. For a large share of the electorate, party membership is primarily a defence against the other side. Elections run on that fuel become referendums on the enemy rather than contests between programmes — which is one way to read a midterm in which a megachurch pastor wins Kansas and a progressive physician wins Michigan on the same night: the national argument, not the local one, is what voters believe they are deciding.

The Exhausted Middle Is Not A Middle

It would be wrong to picture two equally committed armies and nothing else. Pew’s surveys also find that 27 percent of Americans now hold unfavourable views of both parties — more than four times the share in 1994. In its 2023 study of the public’s view of politics, only 2 percent of Americans used positive words to describe the system; 79 percent reached for negative ones, “divisive” and “corrupt” among the most common. That is not a centre waiting to be organised. It is a large, disengaged bloc that dislikes both camps and trusts neither — and its existence is part of the same measurement. Polarization in the American data is not simply two sides pulling apart; it is the space between them emptying of anyone willing to stand in it.

What Tuesday Showed

None of this decides any single election; campaigns, candidates and economies do that, and Tuesday had all three. But the structure the surveys describe was visible all over the results. Susan Collins survived for three decades in Maine as the Senate’s archetypal crossover figure, winning voters from the other party as a matter of routine; she fell on Tuesday to a substitute nominee in a race that nationalised within weeks. Kansas, which had not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, sent one on the same night it was voting in a national wave. States moved together because the country increasingly votes as one national electorate with two national identities — and on the evidence of thirty years of Pew data, each identity is now held together as much by opposition to the other as by anything it proposes itself. The new Congress that assembles on January 3 will govern inside those numbers. So will the country that produced them.

Sources: Pew Research Center, “As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System” (survey of 6,174 U.S. adults, June 27–July 4, 2022); Pew Research Center, “Political Polarization in the American Public” (2014) and “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider” (2017); Pew Research Center, “Americans’ Dismal Views of the Nation’s Politics” (2023); Iyengar, Lelkes, Levendusky, Malhotra and Westwood, “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States,” Annual Review of Political Science (2019); Davies Daily election results coverage, November 3–4, 2026.