What do Democrats and Republicans both like?

By THE DATA TEAM

IN AN era of deep partisan division in America, is there anything about which Democrats and Republicans still agree? A new working paper by Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, finds a few remaining areas of common ground. His study relies on surveys conducted by YouGov, a pollster, which asked 2,500 Americans to rate on a scale from zero to ten how favourably they view different individuals and social groups. A zero corresponded to “extremely unfavourably” and a ten corresponded to “extremely favourably”.

Unsurprisingly, the most polarising groups are those that tend to divide the major parties: Democrats, for instance, are not big fans of the National Rifle Association, while Republicans tend to frown upon Black Lives Matter. Politicians usually draw the ire of the opposing party. Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, manages to draw the contempt of both parties.

Even subjects that don’t typically feature in campaign ads show yawning partisan gaps—for example, Democrats are much more likely to admire the United Nations than Republicans are. The few topics that received high scores from both parties tended to be blandly unobjectionable, such as nurses and farmers. Perhaps the strongest point of concurrence was that respondents from both parties found Congress equally distasteful.