A recent study published in PNAS Nexus suggests that political polarization in the United States is straining personal relationships, with more than a third of Americans reporting they have lost a friend, family member, or romantic partner over political differences. These relationship losses tend to fuel deeper animosity toward opposing voters, providing evidence that political divides impact daily social connections and mental well-being.
Political polarization refers to the growing gap in political attitudes and the increasing dislike between members of opposing political parties. As Democrats and Republicans report increasingly negative feelings toward one another, they tend to spend less time together in everyday life. People often seek out others with similar political views when choosing friends, spouses, and neighborhoods. They might do this because they view political affiliations as a reflection of core moral values.
Mertcan Güngör and Peter H. Ditto designed this research to understand the personal costs of these political divisions. Güngör noted that his interest in the topic grew from previous research on how people deal with offensive speech.
“I am interested in how people react to speech and beliefs they find morally offensive,” said Güngör, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Irvine. “I had a project where I looked at what kinds of responses people found appropriate for someone who posts offensive political content online. Among those responses were social penalties, like getting publicly called out or excluded by peers.”
This led him to question how people apply these social penalties to their actual interpersonal connections. “Then I wondered how people would react if someone in their lives had offensive beliefs,” Güngör explained. “Where would they draw the line and decide to cut the person out of their lives?”
After running a series of studies using hypothetical scenarios, Güngör wanted to see what happens outside the laboratory. “I wondered how often this actually occurs in real life, and that became the Political Breakups paper,” he said.
Güngör and Ditto wanted to measure how often these relationship endings happen, who initiates them, and how they affect views of political opponents. The researchers defined a political breakup as the loss of a relationship with a friend, family member, or romantic partner due to political differences. They explored this phenomenon across multiple datasets representing the United States population.
To explore these trends, the researchers analyzed data from four distinct surveys, combining for a total of 3,791 participants. The first study involved a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adult participants collected in April 2025. Participants answered a checklist question asking if they had ever lost a relationship due to political differences with friends, family members, romantic partners, coworkers, neighbors, or acquaintances.
In this first study, the researchers found that 37 percent of Americans reported having experienced a political breakup. “The overall prevalence of political breakups was quite shocking when we looked at the results last year,” Güngör stated.
Of those who reported losing a relationship, 62 percent lost a friend and 40 percent lost a family member. Another 29 percent lost a coworker, while 10 percent lost a romantic partner. Most of these participants reported losing more than one type of relationship.
“I think the sheer percentage of Americans reporting a political breakup is pretty striking, but this is a case where any number is too many,” Güngör told PsyPost. “And we must keep in mind that relationships get strained in other ways without being terminated. The impact of politics on our relationships is likely broader than what we can cover in our research.”
The second study included 953 adult participants surveyed just before the November 2024 presidential election. In this survey, the researchers asked participants to focus on their most impactful political breakup. The data provides evidence that friendships are uniquely vulnerable, as 69 percent of these most impactful breakups happened with friends. Only 20 percent happened with family members and 5 percent with romantic partners.
Güngör and Ditto also used this second study to see how these breakups occurred. They found that 48 percent of people who experienced a breakup reported that they were the ones who initiated the end of the relationship. About 27 percent said they were on the receiving end, and 20 percent described it as a mutual decision.
The researchers identified consistent partisan differences across all the datasets. Democrats were more likely to report having had a political breakup than Republicans or Independents. In the first study, 47 percent of Democrats reported losing relationships, compared with 29 percent of Republicans and 39 percent of Independents. Democrats were also much more likely to say they initiated the breakup, with 66 percent ending the relationship compared with just 27 percent of Republicans.
The third study examined data from 1,000 adult participants collected in October 2017, focusing on breakups resulting from the 2016 election. The researchers compared these results to the 2025 data, which asked about breakups resulting from the 2024 election. They found that 14 percent of Americans reported breakups over the 2016 election, while 18 percent reported breakups over the 2024 election in half the amount of time. This comparison suggests that the prevalence of political breakups has increased in recent years.
The researchers supplemented these findings with data from the American National Election Studies, looking at thousands of responses from 2020 and 2024. They used an indirect question as a substitute measure by asking participants how much political differences had hurt their family relationships in the past four years. The data showed that 33 percent of Americans reported hurt family relationships in 2020, which increased to 39 percent in 2024.
Güngör and Ditto also investigated how political breakups relate to a person’s feelings about their political opponents. In the second study, participants used rating scales from zero to 100 to measure how warm or cold they felt toward specific groups. The researchers found that those who had experienced a political breakup felt significantly colder toward the opposing political candidate and the people who voted for that candidate.
The researchers also found that people who had experienced political breakups tended to have more negative perceptions of their opponents’ beliefs. “Another finding that I found surprising was that those who had political breakups had very exaggerated perceptions of their opponents’ views,” Güngör noted. “Partisans are usually off the mark when they are asked to guess what their opponents think, but those who had breakups were way off.”
In the third study, participants were asked to estimate the percentage of opposing voters who agreed with certain extreme statements. “For example, in Study 3, Democrats were asked if they thought most white Americans were racist, and then Republicans were asked what percentage of Democrats would say yes,” Güngör said.
“Only 23% of Democrats said yes, but Republicans who didn’t report breakups already overestimated the number by 30 percentage points,” he explained. “Republicans who had breakups overestimated even more: They thought that 68% of Democrats would say most white Americans are racist.”
The researchers noticed this exaggeration across the political spectrum. “It wasn’t just Republicans who misperceived their opponents; we found the same pattern among Democrats as well,” Güngör stated.
“These misperceptions are usually attributed to partisans not having proper contact with the average people who vote differently, but instead relying on caricatures drawn by partisan media or elites,” he added. “What is interesting to me is that people who had political breakups had to have interacted with somebody in real life who thinks differently, yet their perceptions of their opponents were even worse!”
“American politics has become so divisive that it tears friends and family apart,” Güngör told PsyPost. “I don’t want people to think that we’re blaming the individuals who made the hard decision to end their relationships; I want to draw attention to conditions that can bring someone to make such a decision. I see the phenomenon of political breakups as a clear demonstration of how close to home politics has become for so many people.”
The authors noted some potential limitations to their findings, primarily related to the use of self-reported data. “I think the most important limitation is that we are relying on self-report measures,” Güngör noted. “One concern is social desirability, for example. Some people may not prefer to say they lost a relationship over politics, perhaps they find it embarrassing.”
“Some, on the other hand, may say they did because they think it makes them look like a good, loyal partisan,” he added. “We tried to address these concerns in our supplementary analyses and did not find evidence that the results were affected by social desirability, but it’s still something to think about.”
There is also the possibility of undercounting these breakups. “Another concern is that people on the receiving end of a breakup may not know that they were ‘dumped’ over politics if there was no argument or confrontation, so we’re probably undercounting some cases that ended by ‘ghosting’,” Güngör said.
Question phrasing might also play a role in how people respond to surveys about relationships. “Another problem is that people may not be sure what counts as a political breakup unless you specify certain things,” he explained. “People may have had a political breakup with an acquaintance, for example, but may report because they don’t think it counts as a relationship. I am trying to make the measure as inclusive as possible for future studies.”
Because the surveys measured data at a single point in time, the researchers cannot prove the exact cause and effect relationship between hostility and breakups. Güngör hopes to study this mechanism more closely in upcoming research.
“I want to track participants over time to disentangle cause and effect for the associations that we found,” Güngör said. “For example, we found that those who reported political breakups were more hostile toward opponents. But were they already more hostile and that led them to have a breakup over politics, or did the breakup (or the negative interaction that led to the breakup) increase their hostility?”
The study, “Political breakups: Interpersonal consequences of polarization,” was authored by Mertcan Güngör and Peter H Ditto.
