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

Yes, by most measures, political polarization—especially in the U.S.—is more severe now than it has been in decades, though the picture is nuanced depending on what type of polarization you're measuring.

The U.S. is at or near historic highs

Congressional/elite polarization: On average, Democrats and Republicans are farther apart ideologically today than at any time in the past 50 years. Pew's analysis found both parties have grown more ideologically cohesive, with now only about two dozen moderate Democrats and Republicans left on Capitol Hill, versus more than 160 in 1971-72.

Public ideological sorting: Gallup data shows in 2024, the shares of Republicans identifying as conservative and Democrats identifying as liberal both reached record highs, while the percentage of Americans identifying as moderate has declined from an average of 43% in 1992 to 34% in 2024.

Affective polarization (how much people dislike the other side) has risen even more sharply than policy disagreement. One tracker notes the share of Republicans who view Democrats as "very unfavorable" has risen from 17% in 1994 to 62% in 2024, and the mirror image for Democrats is nearly identical. A recent Cambridge study found almost all the rise in US polarisation over political issues since the eighties occurred from 2008 onwards, with far more Americans now adopting party and ideological labels in line with their opinions than in the late 1980s. That same research found divisions within the US population on social and political issues have increased by 64% since 1988, with almost all this coming after 2008.

Geographic sorting has compounded this: in 1992, 39% of Americans lived in "landslide counties" where one presidential candidate won by 20+ percentage points; by 2024, 57% did, meaning fewer Americans have regular social contact with the opposing party.

Important caveats — it's not uniformly "worse"

Several researchers push back on the idea that everything about polarization is at an all-time peak:

It's a global trend, not just American

The U.S. isn't alone, though it's often cited as an extreme case. A V-Dem-based dataset indicates the global population-weighted Political Polarization Index reached its highest level since 1946 in 2025, with the United States showing a sustained increase to 2.30 over the past three years. Brown University research similarly found that Americans' feelings toward members of the other political party have worsened over time faster than those of residents of European and other prominent democracies, though polarization has also risen in Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland (to a lesser extent), while it actually decreased in the UK, Australia, Germany, Norway and Sweden.

Bottom line

By nearly every measure researchers track—legislative voting patterns, partisan self-identification, "very unfavorable" views of the opposing party, and geographic self-sorting—polarization (particularly affective polarization, the emotional dislike of the other side) is higher than at almost any point in modern recorded history, with most of the acceleration happening since 2008. However, scholars caution that underlying policy preferences and values haven't necessarily become more extreme; rather, people have sorted more cleanly into partisan "teams" that now track pre-existing divides more tightly than before, and ordinary citizens often have more common ground than the loudest partisan voices suggest.