Morning Distribution for Tuesday, February 8, 2022

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Morning Distribution]( Tuesday, February 8, 2022 Your daily briefing from FiveThirtyEight --------------------------------------------------------------- The Morning Story [Crowds gather at the Lorain County Fair Grounds in advance of a rally featuring Donald Trump]( [What To Make Of Polls That Show Americans Are Trending Toward The GOP]( By [Geoffrey Skelley]( and [Mary Radcliffe]( Are there really more Americans identifying as Republicans than Democrats now? For decades, more Americans [have tended to identify]( as Democrats than as Republicans, even if the gap has sometimes been small. But in January, Gallup found that [Republicans had taken the lead]( in party ID during the last three months of 2021: On average, 47 percent identified as a Republican or said they leaned toward the GOP, while 42 percent identified as a Democrat or leaned toward the Democratic Party. Given we’re headed into what will be a competitive midterm election year, this finding [sparked a flurry]( of [headlines in the days]( following [the release of Gallup’s report](. But it’s still too soon to know whether more Americans are actually identifying as Republicans. Gallup’s finding could portend a lasting change, or it could also be a short-term reaction to an unpopular Democratic president, or it could be an artifact of lower response rates by Democrats frustrated with bad news for their party — or it could relate to all of the above. After all, political science research has found that [an individual’s party identification can fluctuate](. That said, party ID also tends to be pretty stable in the long run, such that we’d expect changes across the population to be gradual. To that point, there are two ways of looking at Gallup’s party ID data: quarterly and annually. In the quarterly data, you can see that party ID is volatile. In general, it favors Democrats, but there are numerous spikes in the data as well as instances when Republicans have had the advantage. In the yearly data, meanwhile, it’s easier to see that more Americans have consistently identified as Democrats than Republicans, although there were periods in the early 2000s and early 2010s when party ID was more evenly matched — perhaps not coincidentally, those years featured strong Republican electoral performances — and in 1991 when Republicans even held an advantage, thanks in part to a [very popular GOP president]( in the White House. [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Politics Podcast: Americans Say They’re Over COVID-19. What Does That Mean?]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.