Why both sides in America’s partisan war feel like they’re losing

Both sides in America’s ideological war agree on one striking point: They think their side is losing.

Republicans hopped on the doom train first. Since 2016, an apocalyptic tone has dominated conservative rhetoric. In a survey last year by the Public Religion Research Institute, two-thirds of Republicans said they believed that “America’s best days are now behind us,” and one-third agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

Amid frequent talk of moral decline and warnings about an invasion of immigrants, right-wing discourse holds that the country is headed down the wrong track and that Republican leaders have been ineffective in wresting power from a dominant liberal elite.

Far from triumphant, however, the liberal side has increasingly espoused a similarly despairing view.

Ever since former President Trump’s election, Democrats have whipped up their supporters with predictions of disasters — climate catastrophe, a rising tide of white supremacism, threats to democracy — coupled with grim warnings about their side’s failure to dislodge right-wing power entrenched in the Supreme Court, the Senate and red states.

The reasons why both parties have become so grim are complicated and beyond the scope of a single column. Instead, consider just one aspect of the question: Is one side really losing ground with the public, and on what issues?

Where conservatives are losing

For the last 35 years, American society has grown less religious. In 1990, about 8% of the adult population identified as having no religious affiliation, according to data from the long-running General Social Survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

The share of religious “nones” has increased steadily. Early this year, the Pew Research Center reported it had hit 28%.

As secularism has increased, the population has also become more religiously diverse. As a result, America’s Protestant churches, which once set the tone for the country, have rapidly lost sway.

As recently as 1990, more than six in 10 American adults identified as Protestant. As of 2014, the share dropped below half, and it has continued to decline.

Not all religious people are conservative, and not all “nones” support liberal views. Overall, however, the shift toward greater secularism has gone hand in hand with major changes in values that have left many conservatives, especially the white evangelicals who make up the core of today’s GOP, feeling isolated.

Changing views about LGBTQ+ people

Some of the biggest changes involve views about LGBTQ+ Americans.

A Los Angeles Times poll released earlier this month found, for example, that just 28% of American adults now say that sexual relations between adults of the same sex are always or almost always wrong, compared to 72% in 1985, when The Times conducted a ground-breaking study of the public’s views toward LGBTQ+ issues.

In 1985, 64% said they would be very upset if their child was gay or lesbian. Now, 14% say that, according to the new poll, which was conducted for The Times by NORC.

Support for legal recognition of same-sex marriages, which stood at 27% in 1995, now stands at 71%, according to annual surveys conducted by Gallup.

LGBTQ+ issues are not the only ones on which public opinion has moved to the left: In the late 1950s, just 4% of American adults said they approved of interracial marriage. By 1995, that share had risen to just under half, but appeared to have plateaued. In the late 1990s, however, it began to shoot upward again and now sits above 90%, according to Gallup’s data.

In the last couple of years, views of abortion have also shifted, mostly since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that overturned Roe vs. Wade. Just over 1 in 3 U.S. adults now say abortions should be legal in all circumstances, up from 1 in 4 in 2019, in Gallup’s data. The share saying abortions should always be illegal has dropped several points and now stands at about 1 in 8.

Overall, about one-third of American adults call their views on social issues liberal, one-third say they’re conservative and one-third say moderate, Gallup finds. That parity is a new thing — over the past 25 years, the share calling themselves liberal has increased significantly and the other two groups have declined.

Shifts away from traditional views of religion, gender roles and sexuality undergird much of the pessimism on the right. Even when conservatives succeed in winning elections, they’ve found themselves unable to turn back the tides of change in American culture.

Where liberals are losing

Liberal views may be winning the culture wars, but to the frustration of activists on the left, in other realms, such as economic policy or the role of government, they’ve been unable to generate sustained support for fundamental changes in American institutions that they seek.

On healthcare, for example, the public broadly supports the idea of universal coverage, but backing for a single-payer, government health plan which would replace existing private insurance — a longtime goal on the left — has been tepid, according to years of surveys by KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Support for President Obama’s Affordable Care Act began to solidify when Republicans moved to repeal it in 2017. The law has become steadily more popular since then; more than 6 in 10 Americans now have a favorable view of it. But its popularity may have come at the expense of any plans to more dramatically reshape the healthcare system.

On another topic of high importance to liberal activists, the public generally agrees that rapid warming of the Earth’s climate represents a significant problem, and about half agree that the problem is mostly attributable to human activity. But a majority do not see climate change as a top priority.

Americans generally support the policies President Biden has put forward to combat global warming, such as incentives to help people buy electric cars. That support can wane quickly, however, if voters perceive such policies as a threat to their pocketbooks.

That mixed view isn’t solely an American phenomenon. Green parties lost ground in European elections this month. Analysts have attributed those losses largely to voter concerns about higher costs from aggressive policies to combat climate change.

Race and policing provide another field that has frustrated activists on the left. In 2020, the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police sparked a nationwide protest movement. That briefly led liberal lawmakers to hope they could get support for proposals to rein in police power and redirect resources away from policing toward other public services.

Backing for those ideas, however, quickly dissipated in 2021 amid public fears over rising crime. The sharp decline in crime across most of the country last year and this year has not revived support for fundamental changes in policing.

In Los Angeles, almost 7 in 10 adults opposed proposals to “defund” the police, a poll by Loyola Marymount University found in 2022.

One more example: Trump’s years in office generated a wave of sympathy toward migrants that for a time moved public opinion on immigration issues to the left. Once Trump left the White House, however, public support for increased immigration declined again.

Abnormal pessimism

So perhaps it’s not surprising that activists on each side feel they’re losing ground — each side has put at the top of its agenda priorities that the public at large either rejects (abortion restrictions, major expansions of government’s role in healthcare) or has doubts about.

Still, the bipartisan pessimism is unusual.

Until recently, one of the truisms of U.S. politics was that parties most often won by seizing the high ground of optimism. That’s the shared legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, John F. Kennedy’s declaration that the “torch has been passed to a new generation,” Ronald Reagan’s evocation of a “shining city upon a hill” and Barack Obama’s “Yes, we can.”

Sometimes one side or the other has fallen into a pessimistic rut — usually as a result of a long losing spell — but for both parties to do so at the same time is rare.

The shift to pessimism in both parties helps explain why the public views both Trump and Biden so negatively. Over the last half-century, the 2016 contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton is the only other one in which the public viewed both candidates unfavorably, and the current distaste toward both Trump and Biden is deeper now than it was then.

Eventually, one party or the other may recapture the longstanding American sense of optimism and use it to forge a new message around priorities that a majority of voters share. For now, however, the likely scenario is four more months of declarations that the sky will imminently fall. It’s not surprising that voters find such campaigns dispiriting.

Biden gains ground

Poll of the week: Fox News’ latest national poll finds Biden ahead of Trump for the first time since October. It’s one of a raft of national polls that have shown Biden gaining a crucial few points in the aftermath of Trump’s conviction in his New York hush-money case.

This week’s must-read: How Americans perceive the economy has changed since before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The L.A. Times special: With immigration at the forefront of the presidential election, the U.S.-Mexico border has become an increasingly significant political issue in California’s congressional races.
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