The percentage of Americans who identify as Democrats plunged to a record low last year, according to a new poll published just 10 months before the party tries to re-elect its unpopular president.
A Gallup survey released on Friday said the Democratic Party’s advantage in numbers disappeared in 2023, and there are as many Republicans as there are Democrats for the first time since 2004.
At the end of the year, 27 percent of Americans said they identified as Democrats, which was tied with the percentage who identified as Republicans.
The percentage of Americans who identify as Democrats has been on the decline since 2008, when the country elected Barack Obama as its 44th president.
The Democrats had held an edge in party identification over the GOP since 2005 and most years going back to 1988, when Gallup first began tracking the metric.
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In 2008, 35 percent of Americans called themselves Democrats compared with only 28 percent who called themselves Republicans.
By 2010, the Democrats had dropped to 31 percent.
In 2016, after a few moderate dips, the party was again at 31 percent when Republican Donald Trump ran his first presidential campaign against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
The percentage of those identifying as Republicans roughly remained the same over the last decade.
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Now, the split between the parties is dead even.
Simultaneously, the percentage of Americans who identify as politically independent has skyrocketed to match its highest level.
Forty-three percent of Americans called themselves independent in 2023, which matches the mark from 2014.
The percentage who identified as independent bottomed out in 2004 at 31 percent.
“Independents first outnumbered supporters of both major political parties in 1991 and have continued to do so since then, except in several years between 2004 and 2008,” Gallup said in a statement on the new poll.
“Over time, the increase in the percentage of independents has come more at the expense of Democrats than Republicans, which might be expected since Democrats were previously the largest political group,” it said.
Gallup further noted that “Democratic identification has now declined by one point in each of the past three years. These declines, and the new low registered in 2023, are likely tied to President Joe Biden’s unpopularity.”
The pollster also concluded that Biden’s party is “clearly in a weaker position than they have been in any recent election year.”
Gallup surveyed 12,145 American adults by phone throughout 2023 and reported the poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 1 percentage point.
