More Than a Third of Americans Have Lost Relationships Over Politics

Somewhere around 2016, something shifted in how Americans fight about politics. Not in the fights themselves, which have always been loud and sometimes vicious, but in what came after. People started walking away. From friends of twenty years, from family dinners, from colleagues they’d liked well enough before they learned how they voted. A new study puts a number on it: 37 percent of Americans now report having lost at least one relationship due to political differences, a proportion that researchers at the University of California, Irvine say appears to have grown substantially since the last decade began.

The findings, published this month in PNAS Nexus, are drawn from four separate datasets totalling nearly 4,000 respondents, supplemented by data from the American National Election Studies. They represent, as far as anyone can tell, the most systematic attempt yet to measure what the researchers call “political breakups”: the endpoint of polarization, when animosity stops being something people feel and becomes something they act on.

What makes the phenomenon worth studying, and what gives the numbers their particular weight, is the cascade of consequences that seems to follow. People who lose relationships over politics don’t simply move on; they appear to become worse at understanding their opponents. Those who reported breakups in the study overestimated the extremity of opposing views by a striking margin. Democrats who had cut ties with Republicans estimated, on average, 12.6 percentage points more of them agreed with white nationalists than their fellow Democrats without breakups had estimated (and those estimates were already off by roughly thirty points). Republicans who had broken from Democrats thought 19.2 percentage points more of them didn’t love America. Broken contact, it turns out, doesn’t neutralize hostility. It seems to amplify it.

Friendships at the Front Line

The study found that friendships bear the brunt. Of those who reported political breakups, 62 percent lost a friend, versus 40 percent who lost family contact and only 10 percent who ended a romantic relationship. That asymmetry is probably not accidental. Romantic partnerships and family ties come bundled with financial entanglements, shared children, holiday obligations, and social pressures that make severance genuinely costly. Friendships, the researchers note, are uniquely exposed: close enough that political differences tend to surface, but without the structural scaffolding that keeps other relationships intact through disagreement.

The partisan skew is one of the more politically uncomfortable findings. Democrats were substantially more likely to report having had a political breakup across all four datasets, and substantially more likely to have initiated one. In the most recent survey, 47 percent of Democrats reported losing a relationship, compared with 29 percent of Republicans. Among Democrats who had experienced breakups, 66 percent said they were the ones who ended things; among Republicans with breakups, only 27 percent said the same. The researchers are careful not to read a simple moral into this. They note that recent research suggests Democrats perceive Republicans as posing a specific kind of harm to disadvantaged groups, which may heighten the felt cost of maintaining those friendships. Whether the asymmetry reflects something stable about liberal and conservative moral psychology, or something more contingent about the Trump era specifically, they say they can’t determine from existing data.

The trajectory matters, too. Measuring historical trends in relationship dissolution is genuinely difficult (people forget; they reclassify; time heals some rifts before surveys catch them). But the available indicators all point the same direction. Breakups attributable to the 2024 presidential election had already, within five and a half months of the vote, exceeded the rate reported after the 2016 election at a year’s remove. Panel participants surveyed after both the 2020 and 2024 elections showed a small but statistically significant increase in family relationships damaged by political differences.

A Lonelier Democracy

There’s a feedback loop embedded in these findings that the researchers clearly find troubling. The existing literature on intergroup contact suggests that exposure to people with different views (real, sustained exposure, the kind that comes from actual friendship) tends to reduce partisan hostility and build political tolerance. Political breakups close exactly that channel. Someone who severs a friendship with a person from the other party loses not just a friend but a corrective; a reason to think that the people over there aren’t quite as extreme or as malevolent as the media and their own social circle might imply. What the study finds is that the experience of a breakup is associated with precisely the distorted perceptions that more contact might have prevented. People who broke up with political opponents were 13 percent more likely to attribute selfish motives to opposing voters than co-partisans who hadn’t, and showed colder feelings toward those voters by nearly eight degrees on a hundred-point thermometer. The hostility toward ordinary voters (as distinct from politicians) was notably sharper than the hostility toward candidates and elites, which is the inverse of how affective polarization usually runs.

The researchers acknowledge their data can’t establish causality with certainty. Cross-sectional surveys are limited in that way. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that people who were already more hostile toward the other side were more prone to cutting ties in the first place, rather than the breakup itself generating the subsequent hostility. Probably both processes are operating, the researchers suggest, feeding on each other. After a breakup, people may selectively attend to media coverage that confirms their decision was right, rationalising the cost. They may generalise from a single unpleasant acquaintance to an entire half of the electorate.

There is also the loneliness question. The U.S. Surgeon General declared an epidemic of loneliness in 2023, identifying weakened social ties as a major public health concern. The irony the researchers flag, quietly but pointedly, is that polarization is simultaneously eroding the social connections that protect mental and physical health, and doing so partly through this mechanism, people actively cutting off relationships, believing it necessary, while incrementally isolating themselves.

The researchers stop short of prescriptions. They call for longitudinal work to disentangle cause from effect, and for comparative studies across multiparty systems where the dynamics might look different. What they do say plainly is that political breakups are not simply an individual choice or a symptom of healthy self-sorting. They are a social cost. And if the trends continue, the bill keeps rising on both ends: in the health of a democracy that depends on citizens actually encountering each other across difference, and in the well-being of a population that depends on relationships to stay sane and connected.

The question is whether that recognition changes anything, or whether the next election just adds a few more percentage points to the count.

Source: Güngör & Ditto, PNAS Nexus, 2026. doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag067

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do political breakups seem to make people more hostile toward the other side, not less?

Losing a relationship over politics tends to close off the very contact that helps people form accurate impressions of those they disagree with. Without that, people appear to rely more heavily on partisan media and in-group accounts, which tend to paint opponents as more extreme. The study also suggests a rationalisation process: after the social and emotional cost of ending a friendship, people may seek out information that confirms they made the right call, deepening rather than moderating their views.

Is it true that Democrats are more likely to end friendships over politics than Republicans?

The data consistently show that yes, across four separate datasets, Democrats were more likely to report political breakups and more likely to have been the ones who initiated them. The researchers flag this as a real asymmetry but resist simple explanations; one current line of research suggests Democrats perceive Republicans as posing particular harm to disadvantaged groups, which may raise the felt stakes of maintaining those friendships. Whether the difference is a stable feature of liberal versus conservative psychology or a response to specific political figures and events since 2016 remains an open question.

Could repairing these lost relationships actually help reduce polarization?

The research on intergroup contact suggests it might, though the effect is probably modest and depends heavily on the quality of contact rather than mere exposure. What the study underscores is that the inverse is also true: losing contact with people who think differently removes a natural corrective to distorted perceptions, leaving people more reliant on partisan sources and less likely to encounter views that challenge their assumptions. Rebuilding those connections, at scale, is a harder problem than identifying their absence.

How does losing a friendship over politics affect your health?

The paper doesn’t measure health outcomes directly, but it flags a significant overlap with the loneliness literature. Decades of research link weak social ties to elevated risks of mortality, depression, and physical illness. If political breakups are incrementally shrinking people’s social networks (and the study suggests they are, for a substantial share of the population) that has implications well beyond the political. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 report on the loneliness epidemic identified exactly this kind of social erosion as a public health concern.