Weighting It Out: Party Identification and Election 2004

By Larry Hugick and Stacy DiAngelo

Second of three parts.

The party identification distributions in preelection surveys came under unusual scrutiny in election year 2004. Poll critics who maintained that party ID should be treated like a demographic constant highlighted deviation from the "correct" party ID distribution as evidence of flawed survey methodology, leading to charges that the Newsweek poll and other major national polls had a partisan bias. In the end, however, exit poll results showing a more Republican electorate in 2004 as compared to previous elections strongly supported the view that party ID is fluid, not a fixed characteristic. In part 2 of a Public Opinion Pros three-part series, Larry Hugick and Stacy DiAngelo look at trends in party ID in the three years leading up to the election, and analyze the shifts by demographic subgroups.

To understand movement in party identification during election year 2004, it is important to look first at the big picture and examine trends in party ID since 2001, when George W. Bush first took office. For this purpose, a datafile was created that included a total of forty-one individual polls conducted by Princeton Survey Research between January 2001 and December 2004, principally for Newsweek magazine, plus six polls conducted by Princeton Survey Research on behalf of the Pew Center for the People & the Press and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation at a few important times when the Newsweek poll was inactive. Along with party ID distribution, the file included other political variables, among them presidential approval and Bush vs. Kerry trial heat questions, where available, and demographics. Yearly and quarterly averages were calculated.

The party ID yearly averages for the period 2001-04 showed strong evidence of a post-9/11 effect. As shown in Table 1, in 2002 the Republicans climbed to within one point of the Democrats in party ID among the general public. In the four preceding years, the Democrats held a consistent four to five point advantage.

Note: All data from PSRA/Newsweek polls with the following exceptions: 2001 includes data from Pew's June News Interest Index (6/13-17/01), Pew's July Favorability poll (7/2-12/01), and Kaiser's August Health News Index (8/2-5/01). 2002 includes data from Kaiser's December Health News Index (12/6-10/02). 2004 includes data from Pew's August Convention (8/5-10/04) and Kaiser's August Health Poll Report (8/5-8/04)

This marked the best showing in the GOP in Newsweek poll yearly averages since 1994-95, when the two major parties were dead even, 30 percent to 30 percent. The post-9/11 surge for the Republicans was reported by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in a report released in the fall of 2003. The Pew party ID averages for the years studied mirror those from the Newsweek poll data. Yearly party ID averages recently reported by the Harris Poll also show a similar pattern, although their surveys, which use a different question wording, are consistently higher in the percentage Democratic. The Harris Poll found the Democrats holding a seven to nine point advantage in 1998-2000, compared with a three to five point advantage in subsequent years.