Pollster says ’emotional distance’ between GOP and Dems is growing

Pollster Rob Griffin said in an interview that aired Tuesday on “What America’s Thinking” that the emotional distance between Republicans and Democrats is growing. 

“One of the stories that we tell about what’s happening in politics is that people are moving apart from each other in terms of their policy positions,” Griffin, research director at the Public Religion Research Institute, told Hill.TV’s Joe Concha on Monday. 

“That is a piece of the story, but more important is the emotional distance, the social distance between the two parties,” he continued. 

“How people feel about the other party is actually becoming much more negative over time. They’re not feeling better about their own party, but they are feeling decidedly worse about the other party,” he said. 

Recent polling also shows that Republican and Democratic views of one another appear to be deteriorating. 

A new Axios/Survey Monkey poll found that 61 percent of Democrats see Republicans as “racist,” “bigoted,” and “sexist,” while 54 percent of Democrats said they thought Republicans were “ignorant” and “spiteful.”

“People are more tribal,” Republican pollster Conor Maguire said in the same interview. “You do want to see someone else fail, but it’s just kind of sad. 

— Julia Manchester