FiveThirtyEight: In Gun Ownership Statistics, Partisan Divide Is Sharp

An American child grows up in a married household in the suburbs. What are the chances that his family keeps a gun in their home?

The probability is considerably higher than our New York readers might expect: about 40 percent of such households reported having a gun in their home, according to the exit poll conducted during the 2008 presidential election.

But the odds vary significantly based on the political identity of the child’s parents. If they identify as Democratic voters, the chances are only about one in four, or 25 percent, that they have a gun in their home. But the chances are more than twice that, almost 60 percent, if they are Republicans instead.

It will come as no surprise to those with a passing interest in American politics that Republicans are more likely to own guns than Democrats. But the differences have become much starker in recent years, with gun ownership having become a powerful predictor of political behavior.

In 1973, about 55 percent of Republicans reported having a gun in their household against 45 percent of Democrats, according to the General Social Survey, a biennial poll of American adults.

Gun ownership has declined over the past 40 years — but almost all the decrease has come from Democrats. By 2010, according to the General Social Survey, the gun ownership rate among adults that identified as Democratic had fallen to 22 percent. But it remained at about 50 percent among Republican adults.

Gun ownership rates are slightly higher among those adults who vote regularly, such as those who were surveyed on the 2008 exit poll. Unfortunately, the question on gun ownership was dropped from the 2012 national exit poll. So the 2008 exit poll remains perhaps the most comprehensive recent evaluation on the gun-owning habits of Americans, having polled more than 4,000 voters on whether there was a gun in their household, along with a wide variety of demographic and political characteristics.

The poll makes clear that gun ownership is deeply embedded in political identity, and vice versa. Some other variables, such as whether a voter lives in an urban area, also strongly predict gun ownership. But the differences between the parties remain even after accounting for these characteristics.

Gun ownership rates are highest in rural areas, where guns are more likely to be used for hunting along with personal protection. A majority of Democratic voters in rural areas said they had a gun in their home, according to the survey, although the rate was somewhat higher, 65 percent, among rural Republicans.

In urban areas, 40 percent of Republican voters said they had a gun in their home, while 20 percent of Democrats did.

But the differences are most apparent in suburban areas. There, 58 percent of Republican voters said there was a gun in their household, against just 27 percent of Democrats.

Having school-aged children in the household did not significantly affect gun ownership rates, either positively or negatively. The majority of children to Republican-voting parents had a gun somewhere in their homes, while only about one in four children in Democratic-voting households did. What Democratic parents might view as a safety hazard, Republicans may see as providing their families with an extra measure of protection.

In other respects, the profile of gun owners defies some of the stereotypes that urban liberals might assign to them. For example, despite President Obama’s comments in 2008 about voters who “cling to guns and religion,” the two qualities are not strongly related to each other. Slightly more than 40 percent of voters who said they attended church weekly or more often reported having a gun in their home, about the same percentage as among those who attend religious services just a few times a month or a few times a year.

And gun ownership rates are highest among the middle class, rather than the poor. Households making $50,000 to $100,000 per year were slightly more likely to own guns than those that made a little bit less or a little more. (However, gun ownership rates are inversely correlated with educational attainment.)

The partisan differences persist, however, across almost every demographic measure. White voters were substantially more likely to own guns than Hispanics, blacks or Asians. But white Republicans were more likely to own guns than white Democrats, Asian Republicans more likely than Asian Democrats, and so forth.

More elaborate data-mining techniques, such as logistic regression analysis, suggest that gun ownership is a more powerful predictor of whether a voter is Republican than her gender, whether or not she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, or whether she lives in the South, along with many other demographic characteristics.

And based on demographic inertia, the differences seem likely to grow over time. About 35 percent of Democratic voters aged 65 and older reported having a gun in their home, against about 25 percent of those aged 18 to 29. But gun ownership rates bore little relationship to age among Republican voters, and were constant at about 55 percent among all age groups. That might suggest that gun ownership will continue to decline among Democrats while holding steady among Republicans, further increasing the partisan gap.

Perhaps last weekend’s mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., will serve to partly reverse the partisan split in attitudes toward guns; early polls on Newtown find relatively modest differences between Democrats and Republicans on what they see as the causes of the shooting.

But after moments of healing, the partisan divide in attitudes toward guns has seemed only to accelerate after similar past events, as in Columbine, Colo. It might seem strange that ownership of a single household object is so strongly tied to voting behavior and broader political attitudes in America. But America is an outlier relative to other industrialized nations in its gun ownership rates. Whatever makes this country so different from the rest of the world must surely be reflected in the differences in how Democrats and Republicans see the nation.

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Talks Highlight a Structural Divide

The projected growth of Medicare costs is the single biggest contributor to the country’s long-term budget deficits, many estimates show. No cohort of Americans, with the possible exception of the very affluent, pays enough in Medicare taxes and premiums to cover its eventual Medicare costs.

Much of the early public discussion of the fiscal deadline has focused on taxes, and the decline of tax rates in recent decades has played a crucial role in creating the deficit. But the question of how to reduce the growth of Medicare costs will become increasingly important as the population continues to age and health costs continue to increase.

In the current fiscal talks, Republicans are pushing for significant changes to Medicare, in exchange for agreeing to tax increases. Democrats are arguing that Medicare is not the most pressing budget problem.Read More     

What follows is a primer on Medicare costs.

Q. Is Medicare really a bigger long-term problem than Social Security or military spending?

A. Yes. Over the next 25 years, the Congressional Budget Office projects that Medicare spending will rise to 6.7 percent of the gross domestic product, from 3.7 percent this year. (Other federal health care spending — like Medicaid, the insurance program principally for low-income families — is projected to rise to 3.7 percent of the G.D.P. in 2037, from 1.7 percent this year.)

In total, health care spending’s percentage of the G.D.P. is expected to rise by five points. Social Security spending is projected to rise by only 1.2 percentage points, to 6.2 percent in 2037. All other federal spending is expected to shrink by two percentage points, to 9.6 percent.

These estimates assume that some current policies continue, rather than that the various tax increases and spending cuts scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1 occur and remain in place.

Q. Why is Medicare the big problem?

A. As much attention as the aging of society receives, the rise of medical costs is a bigger budgetary problem. The faster growth of Medicare costs, relative to Social Security costs, highlights this difference.

Social Security costs will indeed grow in coming years, adding to the government’s fiscal problems. But those costs will not grow nearly as rapidly as Medicare’s, because Medicare costs are a function of both the aging society and the cost of treating any one person. Social Security’s costs stem almost entirely from the number of elderly people.

Q. Don’t most Americans pay for their Medicare benefits, through payroll taxes over their working lives?

A. No, and it is not even close. Two married 66-year-olds with roughly average earnings over their lives will end up paying about $122,000 in dedicated Medicare taxes through the payroll tax, including the part their employers pay, according to Eugene Steuerle, Stephanie Rennane and Caleb B. Quakenbush of the Urban Institute. That married couple can expect to receive about three times as much — $387,000, adjusted for inflation — in benefits. The projected gap is even larger for younger people because of growing health care costs.

In short, the single biggest cause of the long-term deficit is that most people receive much more from Medicare than they give to it.

Q. Why are health costs growing so rapidly?

A. For a good reason and a bad one.

The good reason is that our medical system has made enormous progress in recent decades and can treat conditions that once would have killed people. Cancer treatment and cardiac care are two examples of areas with beneficial new treatments that are often not cheap. An American who turns 65 today can expect to live almost 20 more years on average, up from about 16 years in 1980.

The bad reason is that our health care system wastes large amounts of money. The United States spends roughly twice as much money per person on health care as many other rich countries, without getting vastly better results. Americans receive better care in some areas (some cancers) and worse in others (higher error rates).

It is hard to make the case that the American health system provides a good return on the money it spends. Life expectancy is higher and has grown over the last 30 years in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Japan, among other countries.

Q. What are the possible solutions?

A. For starters, we could pay more in taxes. Tax revenues are near a 60-year low as a share of the G.D.P. They will rise somewhat as the economy recovers and incomes increase, but not by nearly enough to pay for growing health care costs.

Covering the future costs of Medicare and Medicaid solely through higher taxes would involve sharp increases — much greater than anything being debated now. So most budget experts believe that changes to Medicare need to be part of the deficit solution.

Among the options are raising the eligibility age, which is now 65; reducing benefits for affluent families; introducing more competition; and paying for quality of care, rather than quantity.

Q. What are the upsides and downsides of each?

A. Let’s take the options one at a time:

The main arguments for raising the eligibility age are that Americans live longer than they used to and that the 2010 health care law makes it easier for people to get insurance if they do not receive it from an employer. The main counterargument is that the longevity increase has been smallest for low-income people, who are most likely to benefit from Medicare coverage.

Reducing benefits for high-income families has some bipartisan support, given the recent increases in income inequality. But some Democrats worry that it could eventually undermine Medicare’s popularity, making it more akin to a welfare program.

Many Republicans advocate for more competition in health care, noting that competition has reduced prices and raised the quality of service in many industries. It has an uneven record of doing so in health care, though, in part because insurers can often profit by denying care.

Paying for quality rather than quantity has support from many economists. But it is not always easy. Patients and doctors often want to proceed with high-cost care even when research has not shown it to be effective.

Q. Does Medicare need to be fixed before Jan. 1?

A. Obviously not. Many potential changes would need to be phased in and would not bring savings for years. Other policy changes, like tax increases, can have a quicker effect on the deficit.

On the other hand, fixing Medicare is never going to be easy. Every budget negotiation between Congress and the president is an opportunity for them to make progress on a fiscal problem that is growing every year.

— David Leonhardt

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