Here’s Gallup’s most recent reckoning of party affiliation:
If you’d prefer to group preference and “leaners” together here’s their reckoning:
My reading of that is that “Neither of the above” is the preference of more Americans than either Democratic or Republican and, if you insist on grouping “lean Democratic” and “lean Republican” with the parties neither party is a majority party but the Republicans have a slight edge over the Democrats.
Here’s another way of looking at it. Republicans hold majorities in the House, the Senate, and the Republican candidate in the last selection sits in the Oval Office.
I don’t see any way you interpret any of that as Democrats being the majority party. Other than, perhaps, the Pauline Kael standard.
Update
A regular commenter pointed out the graphical representation of the tables in the body of the post which I’ve taken the liberty of putting at the top of this post. Thank you, PD.
Given how statistics actually work what we see is the parties are about equally split. At any given time one party gains an edge due to current/recent events, in this case inflation. What always happens then is that the party that has the edge claims they will rule forever.
Steve
Both parties have their explanations.
Republicans have the silent majority; wisecrack, how can you tell the difference between a silent vs non-existent majority?
Democrats have the emerging majority; wisecrack, there are more people, maybe even a majority, waiting for this emerging majority.
The Republicans have rarely been the popular party at least since the New Deal. The Gallup report graphs the numbers for greater visualcy. “Prior to 2022, Republicans only had a slight edge once before, in 1991.” Republican strength with leaners has increased every year since 2018, and party strength as increased since the record low point in 2013.
Trump, or at least Trump-related populism, has been good for the Republican Party, even while Trump polls on things like corruption are pretty high relative to his favorability.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/655157/gop-holds-edge-party-affiliation-third-straight-year.aspx
The irony is that both Ruy Teixeira and John Judis who literally wrote the book on that have been complaining about the policies espoused by the party’s progressive leadership.
The parties are pretty evenly divided and neither seems much interested in trying to get a durable majority. The polling data in the post here showing a fairly even divide is backed up by actual national election results with a rough average of around a 4 point popular vote margin for the victor over the last couple of decades, with many winners not actually getting a majority.
Why should they? The parties have transmogrified from the “catch-all parties” they have always been to approximate programmatic parties that satisfy the fringe groups that dominate each party leadership and the leaderships of each party like that just fine.