Is Animosity for Candidates Driven by Polarization or Personality? Top-right figure illustrates the over time changes in the thermometer ratings for one’s own party and the other party. Partisan polarization has been increasing steadily since 1992, due to lower ratings for the other party. The trend in ideological distance, to its left, provides similar support for negative partisanship. All four of the candidate traits saw substantial increases in the difference between own and other party candidate evaluations, though the divergence for some occurs more recently than for others. In all cases the middle of the distribution has largely moved to the tails for the other candidate, with the general effect on the distribution looking evenly distributed around the mean or nearly flat in the 80s to more bimodal in recent years.
