Checking In On Party Vibes

A topic of particular interest at Searchlight is how Americans engage with the two major parties. We’re curious about what draws people to each party, and what they believe each party does best. This is a complex issue, but we’ve captured an initial snapshot of how Americans define each entity. The results are telling.

The Issues

First, we asked which party focuses more on a host of common topics. This is a variation of the issue prioritization question we wrote about in our climate poll. Every formatting of this approximate question is going to give you slightly different results. We think the commonalities between different ways of asking the question are most likely to be true findings.

Brief Aside—One big flag is that we didn’t ask about climate or the environment in this question, so that won’t be comparable to our other issue prioritization work. However, considering our previous work and other research, we believe climate is seen as a greater focus of Democrats. We also added a couple other options here that were not included in the previous poll.

Once again, Republicans are seen as focusing heavily on immigration. They’re also seen as having a strong focus on crime, foreign policy, taxes, and the economy. The top Democratic issues are also not a surprise—gun control, racism, and health care. What is unusual is that the parties are seen as roughly tied in focus on censorship and corruption. This specific question is limited by its framing, so there’s a possibility that partisans are using “focused on corruption” and “censorship” as derogatory terms for the other party. In the crosstabs, Democrats and Republicans both believe their party is more focused on corruption, but are divided on which party is focused on censorship.

The Good Life

Beyond specific policy proposals, we were curious about how American politics relates to Americans’ desires for a good life. We asked respondents about a set of major life events or goals, first to determine what was important to them, and then to determine what they believe each party most wants for them.

Feeling stable was the most important to respondents, with 88% reporting they’d either accomplished this (60%) or consider it a goal for their personal life (28%). Owning a car or truck was the most common option chosen as having already achieved, with 80% affirming, and another 6% wanting to do so. Retirement is the most aspirational, with 30% having achieved it, and 45% wanting to.

In terms of what respondents believe each party wants for them, the results are pretty grim. There were zero planks that a majority of Americans believed either party wanted for them.

This result is driven by strong skepticism by both Democrats and Republicans that the other party wants anything good for them at all. While we expected some partisan-driven refusal to say positive things, the magnitude of negativity here was a bit surprising.

That negativity is a bit skewed: 72% of Republicans report that they think Democrats want “none of the above” for them, but only 55% of Democrats report that they think Republicans want “none of the above” for them.

Among copartisans, Democrats mostly think Democrats want them to have a good job and stability (69%), but not marriage (37%) or children (36%). Republicans think their party wants them to be able to retire and have a good job (75%), and all other statements are above 50%. While Republicans think Democrats want nothing for them, they do seem to believe that their own party shares their view of a good life. This is less the case for Democrats.

The good news for Democrats is that they’re narrowly winning on “feeling stable in your personal life” (38% think Democrats want it for them, 35% think Republicans want it for them). The bad news for that party is literally everything else: marriage, children, creating wealth, and being your own boss are all far more associated with Republicans by double digits.

Even Democrats are not very convinced that their party wants them to have the traditional markers of a good life.

So, what now?

Everything is expensive right now, and Americans are feeling way less confident that they can afford the same things that previous generations could (for example, in another of our recent surveys, 82% of Americans said they think it will be harder for young people to buy a house.) Inflation and the affordability crisis are certainly a big part of why Americans aren’t feeling overwhelmingly positive about what either party wants for them. But Democrats are also clearly failing to articulate a vision that champions the personal achievements and prosperity that most Americans seek throughout their lives—and that’s something that the party will have to grapple with.

Methods

These questions come from our Omnibus poll. As is our policy, we will roll out sections of the toplines and crosstabs for a multi-issue omnibus poll as we write them up.

This survey was run by Tavern Research via an online sample of 2,408 respondents fielded over web panels from August 1, 2025 to August 11, 2025. The margin of error is 2.8%.