There Are More Democrats Than Republicans In The U.S.

Two bipartisan surveys show Democrats outnumber Republicans in the United States today. The General Social Survey has Democrats leading by 8 points (43% to 35%). The American National Election Survey has Democrats leading by 7 points (46% to 39%).

With both parties energized to participate in the 2020 election, that gives Democrats a significant advantage. To win a national election (like the presidential election), Republicans must win over a substantial majority of Independent voters or substantially depress the Democratic vote.

With Donald Trump heading the Republican ticket, it is unlikely the Republicans can win a substantial margin of Independents. That is why they are doing their best to suppress the Democratic vote (by removing voters from registration rolls, closing polling sites in Democratic districts, Voter ID laws, etc.).

Here's what the Pew Research Center says about the number of Democrats and Republicans:

Gold-standard, nonpartisan surveys have found for decades that more U.S. adults identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party than the Republican Party – whether these surveys take place under GOP or Democratic presidential administrations. That is the finding of two of the highest-quality surveys that use nationally representative data collected through in-person interviews: the General Social Survey and the American National Election Survey. It’s also the result obtained by numerous other reputable surveys that poll Americans by telephone or online using randomly selected samples of adults, including those done by us here at Pew Research Center, as well as those done by Gallup, Fox News, Kaiser Family Foundation and The Associated Press-NORC. (The Census Bureau, which runs the nation’s most authoritative surveys, notably does not ask Americans about their partisan affiliation.)

But polls aren’t the only source of evidence on this question.

In the 31 states that register voters by party, the number of Americans registered as Democrats outnumbered those registered as Republicans by nearly 12 million in mid-2018. Registration with a party is an imperfect measure of whether a person currently identifies with that party, especially in the South. But nationwide comparisons find that registration is closely associated with self-identification, and the two appear to be growing more correlated over time.

In addition, commercial voter files – which attempt to predict the partisanship of voters in all 50 states and the District of Columbia based on information such as address, race, age and primary vote history – indicate that there are more Democratic registered voters than Republican registered voters in the country today.