Are Republicans at a low ebb or making a comeback?
The question is prompted by the new release from the Gallup organization, which showed that the gap in party identification is now the smallest it has been since 2005. Democrats are still in the lead, but not by the double-digit margins they often enjoyed the past two years.
The report was the second in a month from Gallup to suggest that, eight months into the Obama administration, Democrats are losing favor with at least a portion of the electorate. Republicans are cheering the findings as a sign of a potentially important change in the political landscape. Democratic strategists offer cautionary notes about what is actually happening.
Party identification is not the same as party registration. Many states require people to register by party, but some do not. And pollsters ask people not how they are registered but how they identify themselves. As a result, self-disclosed party identification in polling data moves back and forth with events.
Republicans have been on a downward trend for several years. They saw their fortunes begin to sink during George W. Bush’s second term, beginning with disillusionment over his Iraq war strategy and accelerating after his administration’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina. Through 2007 and 2008, Republicans were struggling, and by some evidence, they still are.
In the first quarter of 2005, just after Bush’s reelection, 35 percent of Americans called themselves Republicans, according to Gallup’s data. By the fourth quarter of 2006, just 29 percent identified with the GOP. Republican identification has remained relatively constant ever since: in the third quarter of this year, 27 percent called themselves Republicans.
Democrats have fluctuated only a bit in that period. In the months after Bush’s reelection, according to Gallup’s data, 33 percent of Americans called themselves Democrats. The Democratic Party’s high point (at 36 percent) came in the first half of 2008, the period when the country was focused so intensely on the nomination battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the third quarter of this year, 35 percent called themselves Democrats.
Washington Post-ABC News monthly polls show similar trends, though the numbers are different. A Post-ABC poll in April generated considerable attention when it showed that just 21 percent of Americans identified themselves as Republicans. By August, GOP identification was back up to 25 percent — but still 10 points lower than Democratic identification. It drifted down to 21 percent in September.
All that would suggest that Republicans have not really solved their image problems. At this point, people who once called themselves Republicans are not flocking back to the party. As Gallup put it, “There has been no apparent increase in the percentage of Americans who identify as Republicans on the initial party-preference question.”
What’s behind the narrowing of the gap? The whole shift has come among people who do not initially identify with one of the two major parties. Some are stubbornly independent, but many of these people lean toward one party or another. Over the past few years, more of these leaners have tilted toward the Democrats than toward the Republicans. Not today.
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