Gallup Finds Decline in Democratic Identification Across the Country

In an analysis of 352,840 telephone surveys carried out during 2010, the polling firm Gallup has found that since 2008 Democrats have lost ground in terms of party identification in every state and the District of Columbia.
 
In completing the surveys, respondents were asked which party they identified with or leaned toward if they initially expressed no party preference. The analysis found that the number of states considered solidly Democratic (i.e., where Democrats had more than a 10-point edge in identification over Republicans) declined by more than half between 2008 and 2010, from thirty to fourteen.
 
The number of solidly Republican states, by contrast, inched up from four in 2008 to five in 2010. (Kansas made the leap from “competitive” to “solid Republican.”) Meanwhile the number of states that lean Republican (i.e., where Republicans have a 5- to 10-point edge in identification) has grown from one in 2008 to five in 2010. The largest expansion was in competitive states (i.e., where the parties are within 5 points of each other in terms of identification), which grew from ten in 2008 to eighteen in 2010.
 
Democrats maintain solid edges in populous states such as California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois. Furthermore, for all the Democrats slippage, only one state, New Hampshire, shifted from solidly Democratic to leaning Republican. Nonetheless, Democratic identification edges have shrunk to pre-2008 levels across the board.
 
The biggest such decline occurred in Rhode Island, where Democrats’ identification edge slipped 12.2 percent. However, Democrats maintain an extremely comfortable 19-point edge in the state. The District of Columbia turned up the largest Democratic identification edge, of 67 points, followed by Maryland at 22 points and Massachusetts and Vermont tied at 21 points. The most Republican state was Wyoming, where the GOP held a 31-point identification edge, followed by Utah at 30 points, Idaho at 24 points and Alaska at 17 points.
 Noah Rothman is the online editor at C&E. Email him at nrothman@campaignsandelecitons.com