Party Membership is an Important Piece of Many Voters’ Identity
By Ethan Winter
As part of our 2020 survey, we asked Democratic primary voters about their partisanship.
On February 21, Bernie Sanders (I-VT), candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, did a tweet. Sanders wrote, “I’ve got news for the Republican establishment. I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment. They can’t stop us.” This set off a firestorm online. The episode itself is somewhat silly, but it does raise an interesting question: How might different people who plan to participate in a party’s nominating contest respond to criticism of the party itself?
Typically, we think of identity in terms of demographics (e.g., race, gender, religion, etc), and those identities have gotten a lot of attention, especially recently. But in a primary election—i.e. a contest decided by people who are adopting a partisan affiliation at least in some respect by participating in a party’s nominating contest—the strength of one’s attachment to that party can matter a great deal. In a recent Data for Progress/YouGov Blue survey of 1,619 registered voters that were likely to participate in the Democratic primary, we sought to test attitudes around partisan identity. This survey was in the field from January 18th to the 27th. (This was a panel survey, although here I am only using the second wave results. See below for full details on the survey methodology.)
Specifically, we asked likely Democratic primary participants (hereafter Democratic voters) the following question: “How important is being a [PARTY] to your personal identity?” Respondents were then offered four possible choices: “Very Important,” “Somewhat Important,” “Not Very Important,” and “Not At All Important.” This wording mirrors similar items typically used to ask about the importance of other group identities such as race, gender, or religion. In this post, I filtered out responses to look at those who identify as Democrats— excluding the relatively small number of people who identified as independent, Republican, or other. Thus the question I am interested in is, specifically, “How important is being a Democrat to your personal identity?”
What we found is that being a Democrat is important to most Democratic voters. Importantly, it is a form of identity that cuts across standard demographic lines. White, black, and Latino all report that their partisanship is an important component of their identity. Membership in a political party can thus function as a point of solidarity between otherwise, potentially disparate groups.
Turning to look at specific results, I found that, on net, 81 percent of Democratic voters reported that being a Democrat is either a very or somewhat important part of their identity compared to 19 percent who said it was either not very or not at all important. Considering who is being surveyed, i.e., likely participants in Democratic primaries and caucuses, this is hardly a surprising result. These intra-party contests are, by nature, ones that tend to appeal to the electorate’s most hardened partisans. Indeed, a plurality (44 percent) reported that their partisan identity was “very important” to them.
Next, I broke responses down by Democratic voters’ candidate preference. Being a Democrat was most important to the personal identity of supporters of former Vice President Joe Biden supporters. In total, 85 percent of his supporters said being a Democrat was either very or somewhat important to them, 51 percent of whom reported it was very important to them. In contrast, being a Democrat is far less important to supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). In total, 72 percent of his supporters said that being a Democrat is either very or somewhat important to them and of those only 37 percent said it was very important. Or, and to look at this from the other direction, 28 percent of Sanders supporters said being a Democratic was either not very or not at all important to them compared to only 15 percent among Biden supporters.
There are two explanations for why being a Democrat may be more important to Biden supporters than Sanders supporters that I would like to highlight. The first deals with the kind of campaign both of the candidates are running.
Biden is a lifelong member of the Democratic Party, and as Barack Obama’s vice president is positioned, structurally, as the heir to his political legacy—even if, as Ed Kilgore suggests, this was not Obama’s intent back in 2008. On a personal level, Biden also invokes Obama constantly, both on the trail and in advertisements. The thrust of his campaign is about the importance of putting a Democrat back in the White House to protect the achievements of the Democratic administration of which he was a leading member.
Sanders, meanwhile, has an ambivalent relationship with the Democratic Party—being formally registered as an Independent while caucusing with the Democrats in the Senate. In 2016, he became a Democrat as part of his bid for the party’s nomination before unenrolling upon the completion of the election. In 2018, he competed in Vermont’s Democratic primary before declining the party’s ballot line as he sought reelection to the Senate. All this is to say, being a Democrat does not seem to be an important part of Bernie Sanders’s personal identity— indeed, not being a Democrat seems to be somewhat important to him. It should come as no surprise, then, that his candidacy tends to attract likely Democratic primary participants who feel the same way.
Sanders’s ability to win the support of people with only loose ties to the Democratic Party points to both a possible strength and weakness of his candidacy. As Matthew Yglesias noted in his case for Bernie Sanders, he “consistently runs ahead of Democratic presidential nominees in his home state, which suggests he knows how to overcome the ‘socialist’ label, get people to vote for him despite some eccentricities, and even peel off some Republican votes.” However, in a primary contest—a competition largely between Democrats—this particular skill may be of limited value.
The second explanation I would like to discuss relates to the kind of coalitions Biden and Sanders have both assembled. As documented in extensive polling and now demonstrated in a host of primary contests, Sanders’ support is rooted in voters under 45, ideologically very liberal, and with a (limited) multiracial coalition. Biden voters, meanwhile, tend to be older and suburban— and he carries considerable support from black Democrats.
This matters because the importance of being a Democrat to Democratic voters’ identities varies by race and age. Being a Democrat is more important to black Democrats than Democrats in other racial groups. Indeed, they are the only racial group in which “very important” was the majority response at 53 percent. For both white and Latino Democrats, meanwhile, “very important” was the plurality response, albeit narrowly for the former and more decisively for the latter, at 42 and 46 percent, respectively.
This pattern gets even more interesting at the intersection of race and age. Looking first at responses among Latino Democrats aged 18-29, I found that being a Democrat is relatively unimportant to them. In fact, a slim plurality (34 percent) reported it was either not very or not at all important. This may offer a partial explanation of why support for Sanders is so high among this demographic.
The other finding worth noting is that being a Democrat is relatively less important to Democrats under the age of 45. In contrast, being a Democrat is more important for Democrats over the age of 45 and is especially important to black Democrats over 45 in particular. This may be one reason why we have seen that former evince a willingness to back challengers to Democratic incumbents while the latter has been far more reticent.
These empirical findings lend credence to an argument Eric Levitz recently made: Sanders and the left more generally must make peace with the Normie Dems. As a primary strategy, Levitz contends, Sanders’ decision to reprise his role as a gritty outsider locked in a campaign with the Democratic Establishment has fallen short. Biden now holds a lead in pledged delegates over Sanders. Thus, Levitz argues, it’s time for the campaign to shift its course. Levitz’s case rests on the following claim:
Sanders’s base is strongly ideological and weakly Democratic. But the bulk of blue America’s primary electorate is the opposite: weakly ideological but strongly partisan. Median Democratic primary voters like the Democratic Party and its leadership. They may be open to the idea that Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Nancy Pelosi, and Pete Buttigieg subscribe to a misguided notion of political possibility, but they’re going to be resistant to the claim that they’re all amoral toadies for the billionaire class. Meanwhile, because Democratic primary voters generally like their party, “Beltway Democrats” have a lot of influence over whose side they take in intraparty disputes. Which means that it’s actually important to at least try to cultivate the goodwill of Democratic insiders, rather than actively working to alienate them.
The fact that being a Democrat is important to most Democratic voters appears to be something that the Sanders campaign is coming to terms with. On March 4, the Sanders campaign released an ad featuring former President Barack Obama praising Sanders.
While the status of political parties is increasingly being called into question, for many primary voters their partisanship is an important part of their identity––one that cuts across a variety of other demographic characteristics. The Democratic Party, in particular, is a unique institution in American civic life because, as Levitz notes elsewhere, it manages to “put Latinx housekeepers in Las Vegas in coalition with white industrial laborers in Dearborn, black church ladies in Charleston, and long-winded politics bloggers in Manhattan.” This is no small achievement.
Authorship and Methodology
Ethan Winter @EthanBWinter is a senior advisor to Data for Progress.
This survey was conducted in two waves. The first included 2,953 interviews conducted from June 24th to July 2nd, 2019 by YouGov on the internet of registered voters likely to vote in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020. A sample of 6,116 interviews of self-identified registered voters was selected to be representative of registered voters and weighted according to gender, age, race, education, region, and past presidential vote based on registered voters in the November 2016 Current Population Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The sample was then subsetted to only look at respondents who reported they were likely to vote in their state’s Democratic primary or caucuses. The weights range from 0.2 to 6.4 with a mean of 1 and a standard deviation of 0.5.
The second wave included 1,619 interviews based on recontacting respondents participating in the first wave (a 55% recontact rate). Respondents participated from January 18th to January 27th, 2020. This sample was weighted on gender, age, race, education, region, and past presidential vote to the weighted sample proportions from the first wave. The weights range from 0.5 to 4.5 with a mean of 1 and a standard deviation of 0.4.
For rounding purposes, all results conveyed in the charts sum to 100 percentage points and thus may deviate slightly from crosstab data.