According to a new poll carried out by PredictWise at the request of The Atlantic, Washington, D.C. metro area is one of the most “politically intolerant” in the country.
The poll ranked the counties based on their partisan prejudice. It was found out that the most politically intolerant people tend to be “whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban and more partisan themselves.”
“In general, Republicans seem to dislike Democrats more than Democrats dislike Republicans, PredictWise found. So it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, but what’s clear is that both sides are becoming more hostile toward one another,” the study notes.
Counties such as Montgomery, Prince George’s, Arlington, Fairfax, Charles, Prince William, Stafford, Fauquier, Rappahannock, Culpeper, Shenandoah, Frederick, and Clarke got the highest percentiles for overall political prejudice in the poll.
In order to make the assessment, PredictWise partnered with Pollfish to run a nationwide poll of 2,000 adults to get a sense of people’s feelings about the other party. “The survey asked how people would feel if a close family member married a Republican or a Democrat; how well they think the terms selfish, compassionate, or patriotic describe Democrats versus Republicans; and other questions designed to capture sentiments about political differences,” according to the report.
PredictWise ranked all 3,000 counties in the U.S. on the estimated level of partisan prejudice in each place. The poll determined Suffolk County, Massachusetts, to be the most “politically intolerant” county. The North Country in far upstate New York turned out to be more accepting of political differences.
The poll report was jointly written by Amanda Ripley, the author of The Smartest Kids in the World—and How They Got That Way, and a senior fellow at the Emerson Collective, Rekha Tenjarla, a front-end developer at The Atlantic, and Angela Y. He, a product design fellow at The Atlantic.