Democrat–Republican Couples Face Major Conflict Trigger, Scientists Reveal

Can Democrats and Republicans date? And if they do, can they maintain a healthy relationship? Well, scientists have revealed one activity that couples should avoid if they want to.

Around 30 percent of American citizens are in relationships with someone who has a differing political view to them. And in these relationships, the choice of what media to follow can be a strained one.

Emily Van Duyn, a communication professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, found in new research published in Political Communication that news coverage, and choosing what media to consume, sparked tension between couples. To find out more, she interviewed people in these relationships separately from their partner so that they could speak freely, and asked questions relating to how the couple consumed media. In total, 39 females and 27 males were asked. One participant identified as non-binary.

"I have found a lot of points of tension for cross-cutting couples—many more than my first article on news negotiation was able to showcase. One of the bigger strains that is immediately clear in the data is how much politics has become a stand-in for one's morals and values," Van Duyn told Newsweek.

"Partners whose political beliefs differ often struggle when they perceive their partner's political beliefs as representative of their values; for example, an individual who sees immigration as a humanitarian issue but whose partner views it as a national security issue. In general, I find that this divide in values prompts a lot of differences that are insurmountable, like whether or not their partner is a 'good' person or differences in worldview that manifest in many other ways beyond political conversation."

One example in the study was a 46-year-old woman from Virginia who was a Donald Trump supporter during the 2016 election, the summary on the findings reported. Her boyfriend of two years, however, voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

To deal with this, the couple had a compromise that she had control over news programming in the morning, while her partner could choose the programming in the afternoon. These differences created friction in the couple as the Trump supporter felt that there was too much negative media coverage around the Republican, but her partner strongly disagreed.

Van Duyn found that some couples were able to compromise on one media outlet that did not cause arguments. However, others chose to consume media completely separately in order to keep the peace. Van Duyn dubbed this kind of compromise "negotiated exposure."

"The point in their relationship when couples' political differences emerged affected how partners negotiated news with one another," Van Duyn said in a summary detailing the findings. "While some were aware of their ideological differences at the outset of the relationship, other individuals found their shared tradition of amicably co-viewing the news together disrupted when their partners' views or party affiliation changed. Negotiations around news selection in cross-cutting relationships involved a negotiation of political identity as much as of news exposure."

Another couple involved in the study was a 49-year-old woman from Michigan who had changed from Republican to Democrat in 2016 and 2020. Her husband supported Trump and therefore had beliefs that were "diametrically opposed" to her own.

This couple experienced a "significant source of conflict" due to the news. This is because she viewed CNN, while her husband's ideology did not support this. The woman resolved to watching CNN in private while her husband was out.

For a lot of couples, when the news started affecting their relationships, they made a conscious effort to avoid it altogether. However, the couples that did this also reported extra conflict and mental health problems.

"For couples who are specifically trying to navigate differences in news selection, consumption, and discussion, the more intentional they can be with their boundaries, the better," Van Duyn told Newsweek. "Some of the interviewees in my study were good examples of this. My sense for couples who are trying to navigate political differences more broadly is that what you're communicating about and how you're communicating it are critical.

"For instance, discussing your values and your realities is an important first step to making political differences feel less high-stakes in the relationship. It's possible that cross-cutting partners may feel like they don't share the same values, but when they discuss things from an ideological rather than partisan perspective, they find that they do."

Update 01/17/2024, 6:02 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include additional comments from Van Duyn.

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