American political parties have long been vehicles to represent ever-shifting coalitions of particular interests — economic, regional, social and ideological. …
But the parties also are coalitions of distinct groups of voters, whose shared attitudes and values unite them — and shape the parties they incline toward — at least as much as more impersonal economic and societal forces. The Pew Research Center’s mammoth new political typology report offers a different way to think of the two major parties’ component pieces. CONT.
Drew DeSilver, Pew