Is political polarization worse than it's been in the past?

The answer depends heavily on your time frame and what kind of polarization you're measuring.

Yes — compared to recent decades (1950s–present)

By most modern metrics, the U.S. is more polarized today than at any point since at least the mid-20th century:

Congress/elites: ideological distance between the parties began to grow during the 1970s to the extent that Congress is now more polarized than at any time since the late 1870s Reconstruction Era. Looking at the "overlap interval" between the parties' ideological ranges, today the overlap interval is zero, which was certainly not always true — in the 1960s, about 50 percent of legislators in the two parties overlapped.

The public: Pew's landmark research found that Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in recent history. That study also noted the overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10% to 21%.

"Affective" polarization (how much each side dislikes the other): This has grown sharply — Pew Research Center polling reveals a sharp rise in partisan hostility: in 2022, 72% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats viewed the opposing party as more immoral than other Americans—up dramatically from 47% and 35% in 2016. More recent data shows a 80-point partisan gap in Trump approval, the highest recorded in modern polling era, compared to 70 points for Obama and 60 points for Clinton; 63% of Americans see the opposing party as a "threat to democracy," with affective polarization roughly doubling since 1994.

Public perception: A September 2024 Gallup poll found a record 80 percent of U.S. adults believe Americans are greatly divided on the most important values, while just 18 percent believe the country is united.

No — compared to the full sweep of U.S. history

Historians push back hard on the "most divided ever" framing. A Civil War historian argues that current divisions pale in comparison to those of the mid-19th century, noting after the war ended, the country soon entered a decade of virulent, and often violent, disagreement about how best to order a biracial society in the absence of slavery. The broader point: the scale and fury of the ensuing combat underscores the utter inappropriateness of claims that the United States is more divided now than ever before.

Political scientists using long-run congressional data agree: viewed within the context of data from the last two centuries, today's levels of polarization are not such an alarming anomaly compared to those occurring during the time of slavery and similar points along the historical continuum.

An important nuance: it's not uniform

A useful distinction is between how much people dislike the other side versus how much they actually disagree on policy. One summary of this research notes that one of the most important findings in political science research on polarization is the gap between affective polarization and issue polarization — Americans' emotional hostility toward the opposing party has grown far faster than their actual disagreement on many specific policies, where cross-partisan majorities often still exist on issues like Medicare drug negotiation, pre-existing conditions protections, and marijuana decriminalization.

There's also evidence of geographic self-sorting reinforcing the divide: the share of Americans in "landslide counties" grew from 39% (1992) to 57% (2024), limiting cross-partisan exposure.

Bottom line

So "worse than ever" is defensible only with a fairly short historical memory — but "worse than in generations" is well-supported by the data.