Friendships have ended over it. Family dinners have gotten awkward and stayed that way. For a growing number of Americans, politics hasn’t just created tension; it has cost them relationships entirely.
A large-scale study published in PNAS Nexus found that 37 percent of Americans reported losing a relationship with a friend, family member, romantic partner, or coworker because of political differences. That’s roughly four in ten adults who say politics actually ended a relationship. A clear pattern also emerged in who’s doing the splitting: Democrats were more likely than Republicans to report having lost a relationship over politics, and among those who had a breakup in one survey, Democrats were more likely to say they initiated the split.
“Given the role of exposure to opposing views in building political tolerance, these ‘political breakups’ are a troubling sign for the health of a democracy,” the researchers wrote. “And given the importance of relationships for well-being, they have implications for the health of citizens as well.”
Friendships Bear the Brunt of Political Breakups
Psychologists Mertcan Güngör and Peter H. Ditto, both from the University of California, Irvine, drew on four separate datasets with a combined 3,791 participants, supplemented by data from the American National Election Studies. Their most recent dataset came from a nationally representative sample of 1,000 U.S. adults surveyed through YouGov in April 2025.
Among those who reported a political breakup, 62 percent said they’d lost a friend, 40 percent a family member, 29 percent a coworker, and 10 percent a romantic partner. More than half said they’d lost more than one type of relationship.
Friendships may be especially at risk. Close enough that political disagreements tend to come up, but without the structural glue of shared finances, children, or decades-long bonds that hold romantic and family relationships together, friendships have fewer reasons to survive a serious political rift.
In the YouGov survey, about 46 percent of Democrats reported a political breakup, compared with roughly 29 percent of Republicans and 39 percent of Independents. Even after accounting for partisan strength and demographic differences, Democrats were still more likely to report having lost a relationship.
Democrats Are More Likely to Initiate Political Breakups
In a separate survey of about 950 adults conducted through Prolific the day before the 2024 presidential election, the researchers examined how these splits unfold. Among those who’d had a political breakup, 48 percent said they were the one who ended the relationship, while only 27 percent said the other person did. Twenty percent described it as mutual.
Among Democrats specifically, 66 percent of those who’d experienced a breakup said they were the ones who walked away, compared with just 27 percent of Republicans. Both parties tended to describe the person they split from as sitting at the extreme end of the political spectrum.
Political breakups also appear to have surged starting around 2016. Of participants who’d had a breakup, 96 percent placed their most painful split in 2016 or later, with spikes in presidential election years. After the 2016 election, about 14 percent of Americans reported losing relationships because of that race; a survey conducted only five and a half months after the 2024 election put that figure at 18 percent. Researchers said the pattern suggests the trend may be intensifying, though they cautioned that the evidence is limited and election timing may affect recall.
Political Breakups Are Tied to Distorted Views of the Other Side
Perhaps the most unsettling finding involves what political breakups appear to do to people’s attitudes. Those who had lost relationships felt notably colder toward political opponents, and that hostility was aimed more at ordinary voters than at political leaders.
On a standard 100-point warmth scale, people who’d had political breakups rated opposing voters nearly eight points colder than their fellow partisans who hadn’t had a breakup. Among those who initiated the breakup themselves, hostility toward opposing voters was even sharper.
People who’d experienced breakups also held more distorted views of what opponents actually believe. In a 2017 survey, Democrats with breakups overestimated the percentage of Republicans who agreed with white nationalists by about 12.6 percentage points more than Democrats without breakups. Republicans with breakups overestimated the percentage of Democrats who thought most white people in America are racist by about 14.6 percentage points more.
Researchers offered several possible explanations: losing someone with different views may remove one of the few windows into why the other side thinks the way it does, and after a split, people may gravitate toward exaggerated media portrayals to justify their decision. Because all studies were snapshots in time rather than tracking the same people over years, the team could not determine whether hostility comes before a breakup or results from it. Researchers suspect it runs both ways: a cycle where hostility leads to breakups that generate still more hostility.
As Americans retreat into politically like-minded circles, the cross-party relationships that research has linked to greater tolerance keep disappearing. Polarization, it turns out, isn’t just making social connections unpleasant. For millions of Americans, it’s ending them.
Disclaimer: This article is based on findings from a research study published in a peer-reviewed journal. The results reflect associations observed in survey data and should not be interpreted as definitive proof of cause and effect. Sample sizes, methodology, and potential limitations are discussed in the Paper Notes section below.
This article was originally seen on StudyFinds.
