The United States has long had a government that considers itself “by the people, for the people;” however, the vastly differing opinions of the parties in our bipartisan democracy make it difficult to see how certain parties are for certain people. Due to each party’s differing views and policies regarding race and gender, those topics are often two of the largest determinants when it comes to analyzing why people align themselves with a particular political party. In this paper, I ask whether the relationship between a citizen’s race and gender affects their political affiliation. This research is important because it will allow different political parties to see which groups of people they appeal to the most, and will then allow the parties to evaluate current and future policies to either engage the groups that already support them, or appeal to new demographics in the future.
My first figure is a side-by-side graph that shows the distribution of partisanship by race in 1956 and 2016. Whites have changed from being either strongly democrat or strongly republican (low number of independents) in 1956 to being fairly evenly dispersed and slightly leaning republican in 2016. These graphs also show that Blacks have changed from being mostly democratic with some other partisan representation in 1956, to being mostly extremely democratic with none being present past the “weak republican” benchmark.
My second graph shows the distribution of partisanship by gender in both 1956 and 2016 side by side. From these graphs, we can see that females have moved from being more republican in 1956 to more democratic in 2016. These graphs also show that males have changed from being more republican in 1956, to being fairly evenly dispersed in 2016.