American Journalists

The American Journalist Under Attack

 This survey continues the series of major national studies of U.S. journalists begun in 1971 by sociologist John Johnstone and continued in 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2013 by David Weaver, Cleve Wilhoit and their colleagues at Indiana University. Few studies of a profession as important as journalism can claim a half-century’s analytical perspective on the work, professional attitudes, and ethics from large samples of the people working in it. That’s what this study does with its contribution of important decennial measures of the pulse of American journalism. This present study, based on an online survey with 1,600 U.S. journalists conducted in early 2022, updates these findings and adds new ones concerning democracy and threats to journalism. Overall, the findings suggest that the past decade has had significant effects on U.S. journalists, some more negative than positive. Compared to 2013, the latest demographic profile reveals that U.S. journalists are now slightly more educated on average and more likely to identify as Democrats or Independents. While the gender pay gap has narrowed, there are still significantly more men than women in the profession, and fewer racial or ethnic minorities than in the general population. U.S. journalists today are slightly more satisfied with their work and more likely to say they have complete autonomy to select stories. However, about six in 10 journalists say that journalism is headed in the wrong direction, and more than four in 10 say that that their news staffs have shrunk in 2021 rather than remained the same or grown. Other findings also indicate that U.S. journalists are less likely to consider reaching the widest possible audiences and getting information to the public quickly as very important roles, and more likely to emphasize the importance of investigating government claims. U.S. journalists continue to rely heavily on social media in their daily work, despite more than half of the journalists also thinking social media have negative impacts on their profession. Most use social media to check for breaking news and to monitor what other news organizations are doing, and few use these interactive media for interviewing sources. One of the starkest findings is the gender differences in abuse now experienced by a majority of journalists. Female journalists were 7-to-14 times more likely to have experienced sexism and about 10 times more likely to have encountered threats of sexual violence, both online and offline. Additional findings are available online at www.theAmericanJournalist.org Lars Willnat, Ph.D. John Ben Snow Research Professor, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University David H. Weaver, Ph.D. Distinguished and Roy W. Howard Professor Emeritus, Media School, Indiana University Cleve Wilhoit, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, Media School, Indiana University

 

Types of Primaries

 

For those tuning into the discussion of systemic election refrom, this NCSL doc lays out the sorts of primaries used in America. There are degrees of openess. https://t.co/yUP4SCzjXi#AEIElectionReform pic.twitter.com/bRrWQeqOdS

— Kevin R Kosar (@kevinrkosar) December 4, 2023

NPP and DMV

Registering as an independent or "no party preference" does not necessarily reveal much about voter preferences.  Philip Reese reports at the Sac Bee that a surge in NPP registration was largely an artifact of the process:

In the mid-2010s, California passed a “motor voter” law that automatically registered people getting a driver’s license or ID at the DMV, as well as those changing their address — unless they opted out of registration.

Voter registration boomed, rising by nearly 5 million, or 28%, from January 2016 to October 2023.

At first, a huge proportion of the new voters registered as “no party preference.”

When [Paul] Mitchell explored why, he noticed that the DMVs registration form asked residents if they wanted to pick a political party. If they answered “yes,” it would take them to another page where they would choose their party.

“You had to actively say, ‘I want a party,’” he said.

The problem, Mitchell and others said, is that many people don’t like standing in front of a computer at the DMV. To get away quickly, many chose “no.”

“The default dumped them into this big pit of no party preference voters,” said Wesley Hussey, professor of political science at Sacramento State.

The DMV changed the process in 2019, Mitchell said. Instead of asking voters if they wanted to pick a party and then asking them to pick a particular party on a new screen, the DMV created a dropdown menu that immediately allowed voters to choose a party. “Republican” and “Democrat” were on the dropdown list, along with third parties. Voters also have a nearby option for “no party preference.”

The effects were immediate.

In December 2018, before the change went into effect, about 53% of voters who registered at the DMV signed up as Democrats or Republicans, according to registration data collected by Mitchell. Three months later, after the change went into effect, that figure jumped to 74%. The shift has mostly held. During the first ten months of 2023, about 70% of voters registered as either Democrats or Republicans. A DMV spokesman said that the agency “streamlined the political party selection process” in 2019 based on feedback from the Secretary of State.

Religious Composition of Party Coalitions

 Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.  

From Ryan Burge at Religion Unplugged: 

In 2008 the religious composition of the Republicans was:

~75% white Christians.
~10% non-white Christians.
~10% nones.
~5% everyone else.

In 2020, the composition was:

~70% white Christians.
~10% non-white Christians.
~15% nones.
~5% everyone else. pic.twitter.com/TiTRURz6wp

— Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) November 7, 2023

The Democratic coalition in 2020 was this:

~45% non-religious.
~30% white Christians.
~20% non-white Christians.
~5% everyone else.

In 2008 it was:

~35% non-religious.
~40% white Christians.
~20% non-white Christians.
~5% everyone else.

Most Democrats will be nones by 2028. pic.twitter.com/CH0PyWKluE

— Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) November 6, 2023

Democrats and Nones

Frank Newport at Gallup:

The magnitude of this religion gap has increased over the years, to the point where I think it is fair to say that a significant part of the explanation for the “rise of the nones” lies with changes among Democrats, not Republicans.

I looked at this relationship on a year-by-year basis using our annual May GPSS Values surveys, a valuable exercise because the same questions have been asked in basically the same survey context every May since 2001. The percentage of Republican nones has edged up over the last 10 years or so, but the percentage of Democratic nones has increased significantly more. In short, the relatively small partisan gaps in none identification seen two decades ago have increased substantially over the years. 

A Caution About Instant Runoff Voting

Beyond the Spoiler Effect: Can Ranked Choice Voting Solve the Problem of Political Polarization?
University of Illinois Law Review, Forthcoming

Nathan Atkinson University of Wisconsin - Madison
Edward B. Foley Ohio State University (OSU) - Michael E. Moritz College of Law
Scott Ganz Georgetown University - McDonough School of Business

Abstract

Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) is growing in popularity among election reformers, who have coalesced in particular around Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), a specific form of RCV that has recently been adopted in Maine and Alaska and will likely be proposed in many more states as ballot initiatives in the coming years. While reformers hope that IRV can ameliorate extremism and political polarization, this paper presents empirical evidence that undercuts these hopes. For instance, Alaska’s very first election following the state’s adoption of IRV signaled that the method may fail to elect the candidate most preferred by a majority of the state’s voters. Extrapolating from Alaska’s experience, and using a nationally representative sample of over 50,000 voters, we analyze the prospective effects of adopting IRV in every state. This analysis shows that IRV tends to produce winning candidates who are more divergent ideologically from their state’s median voter than do other forms of RCV. And the effect is most pronounced in the most polarized states—precisely the electorates for which IRV is being promoted as an antidote to existing divisiveness. We conclude by highlighting other formulations of RCV that result in more representative outcomes and are thereby better positioned to combat extremism and political polarization.

They explain:

Instant runoff voting does result in the majority rule its advocates tout, but only in the sense that the winning candidate is definitionally preferred to the runner-up candidate by a majority of the electorate. When no more than two candidates are electorally viable, as is frequently the case under two-partyrule, IRV ensures that the candidate with the widest support wins the election. However, a third viable candidate undermines the guarantee that the winner under IRV—or even the runner-up—will be the candidate with the “broadest support from all voters.” In fact, one can easily construct examples where a candidate supported by “a true majority of the voters” is not included in the final two-candidate matchup.

Consider an election with five voters and three candidates: a left-leaning candidate, Linda; a right-leaning candidate, Rachel; and a centrist candidate, Carl. Two voters are liberals and prefer Linda to Carl to Rachel. Two voters are conservatives and prefer Rachel to Carl to Linda. And the lone centrist voter prefers Carl to Linda to Rachel. In an election conducted under IRV, Carl receives only one first-choice vote, and so is eliminated after the first round. The one vote for Carl then transfers to Linda, who wins the runoff election against Rachel by a count of 3-2. Linda does in fact have the “broadest support from all voters” in the contest between Linda and Rachel. However, if the election had been between Carl and Linda, then Carl would have had the “broadest support from all voters,” defeating Linda by a vote of 3-2. Likewise, Carl would have beaten Rachel by the same vote. Yet, because of IRV’s focus on first-place choices in determining the order in which candidates are eliminated from contention, Carl is unable to survive the first ballot. Recall that under Condorcet’s method, Carl would be the most deserving candidate: a majority of voters prefer him to either alternative. But centrist Carl does not win the IRV election when both the liberal and the conservative alternatives have larger bases.

 

Young Voters

Michael Baharaeen at The Liberal Patriot:

Another front on which these cultural shifts occur is age—and this factor has offered a clear advantage to one of the two parties in recent years. To wit: the youth vote remains stubbornly Democratic at the moment. While it has historically been common for people to grow more conservative as they age, this just doesn’t appear to be happening with millennials.

The Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch brilliantly documented how compared to the previous three generations—all of whom voted more Republican the further they got into life—millennials have been trending in the opposite direction so far...

This was especially visible in the 2022 midterms, when Gen Z and millennial voters were the lone generation to vote more Democratic in the national U.S. House vote relative to the 2020 election. Moreover, according to the General Social Survey, young people have voted more Democratic in the last four presidential elections—compared to both other age brackets and their own cohort’s past performance—than at any other time in the past half century.

Among the theories for why younger voters are staying liberal into adulthood is that these voters have also adopted other traits that differ from previous generations—traits that have made them more predisposed to voting Democratic. For example, younger Americans are a less religious cohort. Many are getting married later in life and also forgoing having children. Young people are also growing up in a much more tolerant and diverse society than many of their parents did.

Additionally, there is some evidence that the political events that happened during their formative years—the War on Terror, the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of Donald Trump, increased gun violence, climate change—likely left an imprint on them that will not soon be shaken. Political scientists affiliated with the Democratic data firm Catalist have used sophisticated statistical modeling to track differences by age group over time. 

Adams and the Executive

John Adams: Executive Power and His Presidency
By Gary J. Schmitt  and Joseph M. Bessette
Social Science Research Network

This essay analyzes John Adams’s understanding of executive power and Adams’s practice as president. Its principal focus is the constitutional issues surrounding Adams’s handling of the national security crisis with France and the resulting Quasi-War. It examines Adams’s views on executive leadership, his administration’s relationship with Congress, and Adams’s relationship with his own cabinet–all within the context of the rise of national partisan politics and the emergence of the Republican Party.

Download Working Paper PDF

...

 In his writings Adams had advocated that a nation’s chief executive should provide balance to the political order by standing above and, when needed, resolving disputes between the lower and upper legislative chambers—and more deeply, the classes they would represent. The problem was, this was not really America where the real political divide had become one of parties, not social class.Adams’s desire to stand above this political divide meant that he never considered the possibility of using his leadership position to balance the growth of the Republican party with a coherent, more populist Federalist party agenda of its own. Instead, the High Federalists, who believed that the government’s design and practice was to minimize its republican character as much as was feasible, were free to drive the Federalist persuasion into a political dead end. Yet, not to be forgotten, it was also Adams’s sense of independence, when combined with the  constitutional and institutional tools at the president’s disposal, which allowed him to bring the crisis with France to a successful conclusion.

Religion and Party Identification

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.  

Ryan Burge

The Democrats have gained a ton of new voters from the rise of the nones. They have also lost a ton of voters with the defection of millions of White Christians. (Whether this is a function of vote switching or generational replacement is a debate for a different time.)

...

All this brings me back to what I believe is one of the most important papers I’ve ever read in political science: Activists and Partisan Realignment in the United States by Miller and Schofield. Here’s their theory. Every time a party (the Democrats, in this case) tries to appeal to a new set of voters (nones) it leaves the other part of its flank exposed (white Christians). The opposite party then swoops in and takes over that part of the electorate.

Thus, parties continue to try and make their tent bigger, which inevitably pushes other folks out of the tent to be scooped up by the opposing party.

Supermajorities

 Philip Bump at WP:

Two legislators removed — however temporarily — from their positions in Tennessee. A legislator in Montana ordered to remain outside the chamber. In Missouri, a proposal that would make it easier for Republicans to amend the state constitution and harder for Democrats to do so. In states across the country, an embrace of legislation reflecting partisan dominance instead of compromise.

There’s an obvious reason for this pattern. Over the past 15 years, the number of state legislative bodies dominated by one party or the other has increased dramatically. And with that increase, there’s less need to reach across the aisle.

 

White Christians in Decline

 Robert P. Jones:

[All] white Christian subgroups—white evangelical Protestant, white non-evangelical/mainline Protestant, and white Catholic—have declined across the last two decades. Notably, in the last ten years, white evangelical Protestants have experienced the steepest decline. As recently as 2006, white evangelical Protestants comprised nearly one-quarter of Americans (23%). By the time of Trump’s rise to power, their numbers had dipped to 16.8%. Today, white evangelical Protestants comprise only 13.6% of Americans. As a result of this precipitous decline, white evangelical Protestants are now roughly the same size as white non-evangelical/mainline Protestants, a group that experienced its own decline decades early, but has now generally stabilized.

... 

As the numbers of white Christians have dropped, their presence in our two political parties has also shifted. Two decades ago, white Christians comprised approximately 8 in 10 Republicans, compared to about half of Democrats, a gap of about 30 percentage points. As their numbers have declined, this gap has increased to about 45 percentage points, with white Christians continuing to account for about 7 in 10 Republicans but only about one quarter of Democrats.

...

If we overlay the current ethno-religious composition of our two political parties onto the generational cohort chart, we see a stunning result. In terms of its racial and religious composition, the Democratic Party looks like 20-year-old America, while the Republican Party looks like 80-year-old America.

White Boomer Republicans

 Philip Bump at WP:

Younger Americans are more diverse than older Americans, certainly, and more likely to hold liberal political views. (They are also less likely to be members of political parties.) One effect of this is that the Republican Party skews older than the Democratic Party and, therefore, that boomers make up more of the GOP than the Dems though the generation itself is fairly evenly divided.

... 

What did the overlap of White Americans, Republicans and baby boomers look like? So, using data from the 2020 edition of the American National Election Studies, Gallup and the Census Bureau, I was able to create this Venn diagram.

What I love about this diagram (seen on p. 126, if you have a copy of the book) is that it represents a lot of information very simply. It is admittedly hard to parse percentages or segments from overlapping circles, but you clearly get a sense that a lot of boomers are White Republicans (4 in 10) and that the GOP is heavily White. A quarter of the party is White baby boomers, per this analysis.

Unmarried Voters

 Karlyn Bowman, Ruy Teixeira, and Nate Moore at AEI:

Understanding the unmarried share of the electorate will be increasingly important in coming years. Married voters are still a significantly larger share of the electorate than unmarried ones. But young people are marrying later, if at all. In 2021, according to General Social Survey data, only 15 percent of 18–29-year-old women were married, half of what it was in 2000. The young today are more ethnically diverse, less conventionally religious, and more Democratic or independent than previous generations.

Two trends confirm the liberalism of young women today. An Astin study of entering college freshmen found that in 2016, before the Me Too movement exploded, 41 percent of the women self-identified as liberal or far left, but only 28.9 percent of the young men did. Between 1966, when this survey began, and 1980, men were more liberal. The gap shrank during the Reagan administration, and since the late 1980s, women have been more liberal/left than men in their first year of college. Our AEI colleague Dan Cox showed a similar pattern using Gallup data from 1998 through 2021, with 44 percent of young women describing themselves as liberal in 2021 compared to 25 percent of young men. Additionally, as the August American Perspectives Survey shows, the Dobbs decision appears to be a significant generational moment for young women, who saw the decision as more ominous than their male counterparts. If young women carry these attitudes with them as they age, Democrats will reap the rewards.

Democrats Increasingly Identify as Liberal

Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

After hovering near 50% in recent years, the percentage of Democrats who identify as politically liberal rose four percentage points in 2022 to 54%, a new high for this group. At the same time, the 10% describing themselves as conservative is the lowest to date. Thirty-six percent say their views are moderate, which is typical of the level recorded for Democrats over the past decade.

Longer term, Democrats have been growing more liberal since at least the mid-1990s when Gallup regularly began tracking party groups’ ideological views. The percentage identifying as liberal was 25% in 1994; it rose to 40% by 2010 and 50% by 2017.

As Gallup has reported previously, increased liberal identification among U.S. Democrats has occurred across all demographic categories, but that shift has been particularly pronounced among White Democrats. More than six in 10 White Democrats identified as liberal in 2022, representing a 37-percentage-point increase since 1994. That contrasts with closer to four in 10 Black and Hispanic Democrats identifying as liberal last year, up less than 20 points from 1994.

Polarization and Personal Relationships

Many posts have discussed partisan polarization and aversive or negative partisanship.

Charles Homans and Alyce McFadden  at NYT:

As a new poll suggests, the increasingly stark ideological divides of American politics have come with personal consequences. Nearly one in five voters — 19 percent — said that politics had hurt their friendships or family relationships, according to a poll conducted last week by The New York Times and Siena College.

For all the concern over violent political rhetoric and outright political conflict in the United States, the ruptures that people described were typically quiet ones made more in sorrow than anger, as people with years of common experience came to the conclusion that they no longer even agreed on enough facts to have coherent arguments.

“There’s a great deal of hurt,” said Paul Lucky, 73, a child-care provider and a self-described left-leaning Democrat who lives near Sacramento and who spoke of a strained relationship with his Republican son.

Close to half of the voters in the survey also acknowledged making judgments about other people based on their politics. Forty-eight percent of those polled said that knowing a person’s political views told them either a lot or a little about whether someone was a good person.

Death by Party

Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham & Jason L. Schwartz, "Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic," NBER Working Paper 30512 ttp://www.nber.org/papers/w30512

Political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19, amid evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democrat- leaning counties and evidence of a link between political party affiliation and vaccination views. This study constructs an individual-level dataset with political affiliation and excess death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic via a linkage of 2017 voter registration in Ohio and Florida to mortality data from 2018 to 2021. We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states. Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats. Post- vaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the Democrat excess death rate). The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available.

Protestant Shift Among Hispanics

 Marina E. Franco at Axios:

The percentage of Latinos who identify as Protestant — evangelical and other Christian faiths — is expected to grow from about 25% today to 50% by 2030.

Why it matters: More Latinos are leaving Catholicism for Protestant churches, which is influencing the political landscape in the U.S.

By the numbers: Half of U.S. Hispanics identified as Roman Catholic and 15% as evangelical in 2020, according to data from the Public Religion Research Institute.Two decades ago, those numbers were 53% and 8%, respectively.
An Axios-Ipsos Latino Poll in partnership with Noticias Telemundo also found younger generations of Latinos are less likely to identify as Catholic.

The big picture: People who left the Roman Catholic Church are driving most of the Protestant growth among Latinos, studies show.The boom is also attributed to immigration to the U.S. from countries where evangelicalism is already strong, like Guatemala, according to Jonathan Calvillo, assistant professor at Emory University's School of Theology.

Sociologist Aida I. Ramos, dean of the College of Education, Social and Behavioral Sciences at John Brown University, interviewed Latinos who converted for an upcoming study. She says the most common reasons given for the switch are:They feel disconnected from the Catholic Church that they grew up with and the Protestant “style of worship can feel less confined” to them.

Protestant traditions offered them more community support.

What they’re saying: White non-Hispanic Protestants have often worked to convert Hispanics, Ramos says. But, increasingly, “Latinos are converting other Latinos.”“It's actually Latino congregations and congregants who are inviting their family members, inviting their friends, and are introducing the faith to other Latinos,” Ramos said.

Between the lines: Growing evangelicalism among U.S. Hispanic communities is one of the factors moving Latinos to the right on political issues.

Of note: Most Latino Protestants live in Texas, New Mexico and California counties near the border, with growing numbers in south Florida and in Washington state, data from the Public Religion Research Institute shows.

Polarization Gets More Personal

Many posts have discussed partisan polarization and aversive or negative partisanship.

 From Pew:

Partisan polarization has long been a fact of political life in the United States. But increasingly, Republicans and Democrats view not just the opposing party but also the people in that party in a negative light. Growing shares in each party now describe those in the other party as more closed-minded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent than other Americans.

Perhaps the most striking change is the extent to which partisans view those in the opposing party as immoral. In 2016, about half of Republicans (47%) and slightly more than a third of Democrats (35%) said those in the other party were a lot or somewhat more immoral than other Americans. Today, 72% of Republicans regard Democrats as more immoral, and 63% of Democrats say the same about Republicans.

The pattern is similar with other negative partisan stereotypes: 72% of Republicans and 64% of Democrats say people in the opposing party are more dishonest than other Americans. Fewer than half in each party said this six years ago. Large majorities in both parties also describe those in the other party as more closed-minded than other Americans (83% of Democrats and 69% of Republicans say this), and this sentiment also has increased in recent years.

Yet there is one negative trait that Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to link to their political opponents. A 62% majority of Republicans say Democrats are “more lazy” than other Americans, up from 46% in previous studies in 2019 and 2016. Only about a quarter of Democrats (26%) say Republicans are lazier than others, and this has changed only modestly since 2016.

The new survey on parties and partisanship by Pew Research Center, conducted among 6,174 Americans between June 27 and July 4, 2022, on the nationally representative American Trends Panel, finds that negative sentiment – the belief that the opposing party’s policies are harmful to the country – remains a major factor in why Republicans and Democrats choose to affiliate with their party.

In fact, nearly equal shares of Republicans cite the harm caused by Democratic policies (78%) and the positive impact of GOP policies (76%) as major reasons why they identify with their party. This also is the case for Democrats, with identical shares (68% each) citing these negative and positive reasons for their decision to affiliate with the Democratic Party.

Religion and Party Polarization

 Daniel A. Cox at the Survey Center on American Life:

During just a single generation, the landscape of American religious belief and behavior has undergone sweeping changes. A growing share of the adult public abstains from regular religious practice. They profess greater doubts about the existence of God and no longer identify with any established religious tradition.[xi] A recent survey found that young adults have far less robust religious experiences compared to previous generations.[xii] And although surveys vary in the exact rate of religious decline, there is no disagreement about the trajectory of American religion.

Among both Democrats and Republicans, there are signs of weakening religious attachments, and nonreligious Americans have increased in number. However, the religious decline is occurring much more rapidly among Democrats than Republicans. Across measures of membership, salience, and affiliation, Democrats have experienced a steeper drop in their level of religious commitment.

Religious membership among the public has plummeted over the past decade, but the decline has proceeded unevenly (Figure 4).[xiii] Democratic religious membership has fallen further than among Republicans, more than doubling the partisan gap in religious membership over the past two decades. Today, less than half (45 percent) of Democrats report being a member of a church, synagogue, mosque, or other religious congregation. In the late 1990s, more than seven in 10 (71 percent) Democrats reported that they belonged to a church or other place of worship.

Republican religious membership has also fallen in the past couple of decades, although not nearly as far. Sixty percent of Republicans say they are members of a religious congregation, compared to 77 percent two decades earlier. This differential rate of decline has substantially widened the partisan gap in religious membership over the past two decades.

The rate of change when it comes to the personal importance of religion in Americans’ lives reveals a similar partisan gap. Only 43 percent of Democrats today say religion is a very important part of their lives—a roughly 20 percentage point drop from the late 1990s (Figure 5). In 1998, nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of Democrats said religion was very personally important to them.

The drop in religious salience among Democrats stands in marked contrast to Republicans, whose views of religion have not changed over the past two decades. From 1998 to 2021, at least six in 10 Republicans have reported that religion is very important to them. Today, 65 percent of Republicans say that religion is very relevant in their lives.

The past 20 years have also witnessed growing religious diversity among the Democratic Party. Today, Democrats include a growing number of non-white Christians and people who belong to non-Christian religious traditions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. Until recently, the Democratic and Republican parties were composed of a majority of white Christians.[xiv] In 1998, nearly six in 10 (57 percent) Democrats identified as white Christians, but, roughly 20 years later, white Christians account for only about one in three (31 percent) members of the party.

The Sad State of the Libertarian Party

Andy Craig:

Aside from [Gary] Johnson’s candidacy, the party had mostly drawn attention for antics ranging from the mildly amusing to utterly cringe-inducing, such as running an Elvis Presley impersonator as a perennial candidate, nominating someone who accidentally turned his skin blue by drinking colloidal silver, entertaining the presidential aspirations of the mentally unstable alleged murderer John McAfee, and treating C-SPAN viewers to a man stripping nearly naked on the national convention stage. But now, as Ken White, a criminal defense lawyer and respected commentator known by his online moniker Popehat, aptly observed on Twitter, “bigoted shitposters” have now wrested control from these “mostly harmless cranks.”

Under the direction of the so-called Mises Caucus, the LP has become home to those who don’t have qualms about declaring Holocaust-denying racists “fellow travelers” and who don’t think that bigots are necessarily disqualified from the party. They even went out of their way to delete from the party’s platform its nearly 50-year-old language stating: “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” The caucus is also reversing the party’s longstanding commitment to open immigration policies in favor of border enforcement. The new chair, Angela McArdle, proclaims that the party will now be dedicated to fighting “wokeism.” People with pronouns in their Twitter bios aren’t welcome anymore, but, evidently, white nationalists and Holocaust deniers are.