Is Political Polarization a State Affair?

By Ana Lee

Political polarization is, to put it lightly, the talk of the town. A New York Times/Siena College poll shows that between July 2020 and September 2025, the number of American voters believing the nation is too polarized to solve its own problems increased by 20 percent. The people are losing faith: “a large majority now [believe] that the country is incapable of overcoming its deep divisions,” the Times said in September. The situation is dire. A healthy democracy naturally requires high voter turnout to best represent the wishes of the people, but election participation has dropped in recent years. In this newly developing stage of voter behavior, fewer, more polarized voters appear to be packing the polls. 

Data shows the issues have piled up, the institution of democracy hindered by the actions of its own constituents. Although there are countless causes for this debacle and, consequently, countless ways to analyze the problem, it’s worth looking at it from a local point of view. To do so, data from four states (two red and two blue) during and immediately preceding both the 2012 and 2024 presidential elections can be analyzed. Statistics from the two separate presidential elections, broken down into state-wide data points, prove — with some notable exceptions — that the polarization and the decrease in turnout appear to originate at the local level. State voter registration, official party alignment, and election results all compile themselves into a very clear image: the people are dispensing with bi-partisanship, and it’s souring the democratic institution. 

The UC Santa Barbara American Presidency Project, compiled using federal data, shows that presidential election voter turnout as a percentage of the voting age population decreased from 62.8% in 2020 to a measly 57.8% in 2024. This decrease is unfortunate, given the immense proportional growth trend sustained between 2012 and 2020, and the data makes it clear the US is currently experiencing a bout of backwards progress in terms of voter participation. People have also, during the 2020-24 registration lows, come to believe that the nation is sinking further into extreme polarization (as per the previously mentioned Times/Siena poll). The timing of these developments implies some correlation between decreased voter turnout and dwindling bipartisan sentiments. This is a feasible conclusion: both issues threaten functional democracy on a very fundamental level, and it is likely that they are wreaking havoc in tandem. An analysis of three states during the 2012 and 2024 presidential elections does provide slight relief — in Arizona, California, and New York, the percentage of voters not affiliated with a party remained relatively stable, usually at around 20%, which indicates that some portion of the population is still free from extreme polarization. 

Voters sometimes suffer from the mentality that their vote is not important to the election as a whole, especially if they live in a state aligned with the party they oppose. Testing this idea is another value of analyzing voter data on a state-by-state basis. A Republican voter in blue California, for example, may be disheartened by the sheer amount of Democratic voters in their state and may choose not to register as a Republican because they do not see the value in doing so. The data certainly supports this conclusion — between the 2012 and 2024 elections, Republican Party affiliation in California decreased by 4.4%. A similar, if more pronounced, shift occurred for Democrats in red South Dakota: 35.8% of registered voters in 2012 were affiliated with the Democratic Party, but by 2024, only 23.4% were registered as Democrats. The total amount of non-affiliated voters in the state dropped quite dramatically from 18% to 11%, implying increased partisanship among South Dakota voters. Did South Dakota democrats and California Republicans lose faith in the value of their own votes? Red states seem to be swinging farther right and blue states farther left, and voters that don’t align themselves with their home states’ ideals seem to be lost in the crosshairs. 

This data is not, however, indicative of every single local division in the US. Rather, it represents a snapshot of certain state trends that appear similar in a variety of ways. The data, even when analyzed in terms of politically significant red and blue state boundaries, still has exceptions to the previously mentioned trends. This is entirely logical given the scope of the American voting population and the volume of factors that affect their decisions. Arizona, for example, was the only one of the four states to see a decrease in the percentage difference between Democratic and Republican Party affiliations from 2012 to 2024. Despite the exceptions, there are clear indications that voter turnout is dropping while polarization increases. Local breakdowns of this claim show that this may be a regional affair, closely associated with voters’ belief that their vote does not matter in their region. To overcome this bout of extreme partisanship, then, it may be necessary to turn away from the federal sphere and focus on mentalities within state borders.