I don’t know why I felt compelled to watch The Oscars on Sunday night, but I’m glad I did. It was surprisingly entertaining. Others seem to agree: both viewership and ratings were higher than last year.

Still, less than half as many people watched the Oscars this year compared to 20 years ago. There seem to be a dwindling number of events that capture the national attention. I would imagine the Oscars are “must see” TV on the coasts, but nowhere else.

This is the media manifestation of a more concerning polarization in the political sphere. Americans are sharply divided in how they vote; I think this is now pretty well-understood. These divisions run along a number of lines: young vs old, urban vs suburban, college-educated vs not, white vs non-white, etc.

But increasingly, they’re divided along a new line: homeowner versus renter.

Homeowners are more Republican, Renters are more Democrat

For this analysis I dug into a dataset provided by American National Election Studies (ANES), a non-partisan research center run by Duke University, the University of Michigan, The University of Texas at Austin, and Stanford University, with funding by the National Science Foundation.

ANES has surveyed over 68,000 households every 2 years (since 2004, every 4 years). It’s a big and powerful dataset, with over 1000 variables. Here I looked at two—home tenure (owner/renter) and party affiliation (a scale from 1-7).

My analysis shows that homeowners and renters are deeply polarized, with owners twice as likely to identify as strongly Republican than renters (27% vs 13%). Conversely, renters identify as strongly Democrat far more frequently than owners (30% vs 20%). A higher proportion of renters than owners also identify as independents (15% vs 9%).

For context, the 14% gap between homeowners identifying as strongly Republican (27%) compared to renters (13%) is a far larger gap than between other demographics. Take education, for example: there is only a 6% gap between non-college educated (23.2%) and college-educated people (17%) identifying as strongly Republican.

Owner/renter polarization is getting worse

After relative stability through the second half of the 20th century and the early aughts, these two demographics have moved apart sharply over the past 20 years.

Between 2004 and 2020, the percentage of homeowners identifying as strongly Republican surged from 19% to 27%. Renters are the mirror image: those identifying as strongly Democrat more than doubled, from 13% to 30%.

What’s driving this?

The gap between owners and renters really starts to widen after 2004. This mirrors the broader trend across American society.

But the especially dramatic cleavage between owners and renters may have been exacerbated by demographic changes—particularly, the growing urban/rural split between liberals and conservatives (since renters are concentrated in cities). We will explore this topic more fully in the coming days and weeks.