There are very few partisan differences when it comes to day-to-day family activities.
Much of the political and media discourse today emphasizes the stark political divide between “red” and “blue” America, but when it comes to day-to-day family life, we find few differences between Democrats and Republicans. Over the past decade of the American Family Survey, our consistent finding is that “red” and “blue” families describe their lives at home and their commitments to their families in remarkably similar ways.
Both Democrats and Republicans with young children say family life brings them a great deal of satisfaction. For example, in the 2024 American Family Survey, among parents with children under 18, 86% of Democrats and 89% of Republicans agree that “raising children is one of life’s greatest joys.” (Among married respondents, even higher percentages of both groups agree.) Republicans are more likely than Democrats to “strongly agree” with this statement, but overall, the evidence is overwhelming that both are committed to their children and find raising children, even with its stresses and challenges, to be a source of happiness.
Similarly, among married respondents who have children under 18, 87% of Democrats and 85% of Republicans say they are “somewhat” or “completely” satisfied with their relationships. And in 2024, when asked to rate the strength of their relationships, about half of both married Republicans (45%) and married Democrats (50%) say their marriage is stronger (as opposed to the same or weaker) than two years ago. This result is consistent with previous years. In none of the past 10 years of the American Family Survey has there been there a large divide in partisans’ evaluations of the strength of their own marriages.
Such satisfaction may emerge in part because both groups report spending time working on their relationships. In the 2024 data, 69% of married Democrats and Republicans with children reported that they “discuss their relationship with each other” at least monthly. Similarly, 66% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans who are in a relationship (whether married or not) say they go out with their partners at least a few times a month. In other words, both Republicans and Democrats report that they enjoy their relationships and spend time attending to them. Additional evidence of the importance of relationships and children for both Republicans and Democrats can be seen in how they evaluate the importance of different identities in their lives. We asked about a wide variety of potential identities, and we focus here on family, career, religious, and partisan identities. In the analysis below, we focus on Republicans and Democrats who are married and have children under 18, given that those questions were asked only of respondents who had children or were in a relationship.
Both Republicans and Democrats value their identities as parents and spouses a great deal. (Independents, not shown in order to highlight partisan similarities, tend to be very similar to Democrats in these assessments.) In fact, these family-based identities are the only identities that average above 4 (very important) on the 5-point scale. The differences between partisans in their rating of the importance of these family identities are very small. Much larger differences occur with respect to religious identities, which is not surprising, given that Republicans tend to attend religious services more often than Democrats. Importantly, for both Republicans and Democrats, partisan identities turn out to be far less important than identities connected to family roles.
In other words, both “red” and “blue” Americans who are married and have children value their family-related identities as parents or partners much more than other identities, including the religious or partisan identities that are so often the focus of the nation’s public discourse.
Over most of the past 10 years, the American Family Survey has also included questions about activities families might do together. This battery of questions has been an attempt to understand day-to-day life in American homes. The figure below shows the percentage of Americans who report doing each activity at least weekly. Here our analysis includes all survey respondents, not just those who are married and have children.
The clear take-home over a decade of asking these questions is that large majorities of Americans say they eat dinner together, spend time at home watching TV or a movie or playing games, and doing household chores at least weekly. By contrast, fewer Americans say they worship weekly, argue, or go out to events or activities for a family member. For the latter two activities, the lower levels may be because such events or activities do not occur every week.
There are very few partisan differences when it comes to these activities. We find no distinct “red” or “blue” family tendencies in how often they eat together, work together, or spend time together at home, and these similarities have been consistent over the past decade. The vast majority of American families, whether Democrats, Republicans, or Independents, devote time to family activities at least once a week or more. In this sense, the day-to-day life of the family is something Americans really do have in common.
Of course, these results do not mean there are no partisan differences in family life. The most glaring has to do with frequency of worship. Just as we saw in the partisan gap in the importance of religious identities, Republicans are substantially more likely than Democrats to say that they worship together at least weekly. (We did not ask about any specific form of worship or inquire whether such worship occurred in a formal church denomination or informally at home.)
As the figure below shows, the size of the gap has varied from year to year, but in some years, it has exceeded 20 percentage points. More recently, it has ranged between 13 and 17 percentage points. Notably, less than a majority of both Republicans and Democrats say they worship weekly as a family. Still, in the 2024 data, about 3 in 10 Democrats say they worship as a family on a weekly basis, and nearly half say they never worship together. Among Republicans, about 4 in 10 worship at least weekly, and only 3 in 10 say they never worship together.
It is easy for the occasionally breathless coverage of things like religion and politics to make it seem like the parties are monolithic, though that is far from the case. Democrats are not uniformly secular: 27% of them attend services at least a couple of times a month, and the higher number of Republicans who do this (45%) does not negate the importance of that quarter of the party. Indeed, since 42 percent of Black Democrats report going to religious services that often, the segment of the party that is quite “churched” is quite important.
We also find important differences in the attitudes partisans have about the meaning of the family or the importance of marriage (see “Attitudes About Marriage and Family”). And there are important differences in the extent to which Republicans and Democrats get married. In the 2024 data, for example, 42% of Democrats reported being currently married, compared to 54% of Republicans, and these differences are not merely a function of age.
But amid persistent “culture war” disputes, many aspects of family life are not a function of partisanship. Perhaps it should go without saying that both Republicans and Democrats care for their romantic partnerships and children, but as worries about partisan polarization increase, finding some points of common interest and value strikes us as worth emphasizing. Both Democrats and Republicans love their children and find joy in raising them, value familybased identities like being a parent or a partner much more than partisan identities, and spend time each week in meaningful family activities. Conversations around the dinner table, playing games together, and working together are not the province of one party more than another. Ten years of the American Family Survey have shown us that when it comes to the day-to-day life of partners, parents, and children, there is precious little evidence of a dramatic partisan divide.
By Christopher F. Karpowitz and Jeremy C. Pope with research assistance by Ellie Mitchell
METHODOLOGY NOTE
Between August 22-29, 2024, YouGov interviewed 3,245 respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 3,000 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race, and education. The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined, and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The weights were then post-stratified on 2020 presidential vote choice as well as a four-way stratification of gender, age (4 categories), race (4 categories), and education (4 categories), to produce the final weight. The overall margin of error is +/- 2%.