Who Is Severing Ties With Friends and Family Over Politics?

Report by Kevin McCaffree & Anondah Saide

Article Highlights

1. Approximately 1 in 5 people say they would end a relationship with a friend or family member over political disagreements.
2. Gen Z and Millennials were the most likely to say they would sever ties with friends and family over political disagreements.
3. Liberals across all age groups were more likely than other political groups to say they would sever ties with friends and family.
4. There were no sex differences in willingness to sever ties.
5. Non-parents were more likely to say they’d sever ties than were parents.
6. Age is the strongest single demographic predictor of willingness to sever ties, with younger people being most likely to do so.

Before we started bickering with everyone on social media, who did we debate politics with?

Well, our close family and friends, of course. We tend to have more in common with friends and family than we do with strangers and so people are generally more comfortable talking and disagreeing about politics with others who are close than with strangers or acquaintances.¹

However, in especially politically charged times, some people come to see some of their friends and family as politically repugnant and intolerable. And, if some headlines are to be believed, we may be witnessing a wave of people severing ties with family and friends over politics. Psychology Today asked readers, “Do You End a Close Friendship Because of Politics?” and insinuated the answer is “yes” because dissolving ties with family and friends can be a healthy form of “self-care.”² TIME magazine offered “11 Things to Say to Your Relative Whose Politics You Hate”.³

Most concerning is that it’s not just headlines; data also indicate some worrying trend lines. Recent polling⁴ from the American Psychiatric Association (2024) found that 1 in 5 Americans were estranged from family over political disagreements. About 1 in 5 had also begun skipping family events because of political disagreements. Four years earlier, in 2020, Pew polling⁵ found that around 80% of American registered voters reported having “none” or “just a few” friends with political views different from their own—suggesting that most people’s social network is mostly ideologically homogenous. Survey data from 2016 had even found evidence that political partisans engage in both subtle and blatant forms of “dehumanization” of their political opponents.⁶

While analysis of recent data,⁷ including that from the Skeptic Research Center (discussed below), has revealed that younger Americans are more likely to sever ties than are older Americans, there has been more disagreement over whether peoples’ particular political worldviews—liberal or conservative—might be playing a special role in motivating individuals to sever ties with friends and family. Perhaps conservatives are growing tired of having to endure accusations of racism and sexism at family events, while liberals believe—correctly or not—that their conservative family members are racist and sexist. But who is more likely to sever close ties over politics?

Turning to New Data For Answers

In September of 2024, the Skeptic Research Center surveyed nearly 3,000 Americans—approximately representative by age, race, sex, and educational attainment—covering a variety of topics from immigration, abortion, and crime to free speech, gun control, and climate change.⁸ An important focus of the survey, though, was to learn something new about which Americans would be most likely to sever ties with family and friends over politics.

We found that overall, nearly 1 in 5 Americans expressed a willingness to sever ties with friends and family over political disagreements. To explore this further, see Figures 1 and 2 below.

Notably high proportions of self-identified political liberals told us they’d be willing to sever ties with a friend (Figure 1) or family member (Figure 2) if they thought their political views were “inappropriate.” Specifically, 45% of GenZ liberals and 39% of Millennial liberals told use they’d be willing to sever ties with friends, and over a third of both groups told use they’d be willing to sever ties with family. By contrast, 10% or less of GenX and of Boomer moderates told us they’d sever close ties with friends or family over politics. The proportion among older conservatives was only a little higher, and even young conservatives were far less likely to sever ties than were their young liberal counterparts.

Now, let’s consider family ties more closely, since these are typically regarded as stronger and more enduring than friendship ties. While severing ties with either friends or family should be consequential (if not traumatic), presumably severing ties with family would be the more severe of the two.

Figure 3 depicts political orientation in a more nuanced way so as to assess the extent to which being liberal might be driving this tendency to sever ties. In Figure 3, we see how survey-takers responded when allowed to provide finer degrees of self-identification as “very liberal” or “very conservative” in addition to the standard answer options of liberal, moderate or conservative.

Figure 3 shows clearly that the more liberal a person is, the more likely they were to tell us that they’d sever ties with family over politics. However, we also found that the more conservative people were, the more likely they were to sever ties as well (with the exception of Millennials). This suggests that radicalism/ideological intensity might be driving individuals’ tendency to sever ties more than being liberal per se, although “very liberal” Americans did express a willingness to sever ties with family at substantially higher rates than did “very conservative” Americans.

But which liberals are more willing to sever ties?

To answer this question, we focused in on three key demographics that tend to be important in determining peoples’ political and social attitudes: sex, race, and parenthood status.

First, overall, liberal men and women were about equally likely to break off relationships with family (see Figure 4 above); just over 25% of liberal men and women, overall, said they’d sever family ties over politics. In fact, about equal proportions of men and women across political orientations indicated that they would sever family ties, though this proportion hovered around just 10% for moderates and conservatives. This suggests that sex differences between men and women probably aren’t driving this phenomenon.

What about race? In American politics generally, broad (though nuanced) racial trends in attitudes and voting behavior are discernible. However, in our data with regard to the question of family tie dissolution, only political ideology mattered. Regardless of whether our respondents identified as White, Black, Hispanic or Asian, liberals were more willing to sever ties with family over politics than were conservatives or even moderates.

Finally, in past research, parenthood status has been found to influence many different sorts of political attitudes and behavior⁹ though researchers haven’t looked closely at parents’ willingness to sever close bonds over politics. Our data showed liberals without children were more likely to say that they would sever ties with family than were liberals who were parents. Overall, non-parents were more likely to express a willingness to sever ties (regardless of their age). This would suggest either that having children brings families closer or that closer families tend to have more children, both of which might reduce the likelihood of people prioritizing general political attitudes over close relationships. This effect of parenthood status remained even after controlling for the respondents’ age.

In addition to demographic characteristics, another area surveyed was the role of news media, particularly, peoples’ trust in news journalists. Much has been made recently about how the apparently rightwing skew of online podcasts (from Joe Rogan to Jordan Peterson) is matched only by the longer-standing left-wing dominance of mainstream cable news media (from MSNBC to NPR).^10, 11 So, does peoples’ trust in news journalists increase their willingness to sever ties over politics?

Not for liberals, although we did detect some effects for moderates and conservatives; see Figure 7 below.

We found that about the same percentage of liberals reported a willingness to sever family ties over politics, regardless of whether they had high or low trust in new journalists. Moderates and conservatives with higher trust in journalists, on the other hand, were indeed more likely to say they’d sever ties.

In summary, our results suggest that younger Americans, political liberals and those with greater trust in news journalists are more likely than other groups to say they’d sever ties with family over politics. And it does seem that something specific to being politically liberal, per se, is driving this trend. However, we also found some evidence that having a more extreme ideological attitude in general is associated with a willingness to sever ties.

Our results further suggest that those Americans most willing to sever ties with family over politics are more often childless themselves. From a developmental/life-course perspective, this makes some sense: those more willing to sever ties are also those who themselves have fewer substantial economic and family obligations (that is, because of their of being younger and childless). Perhaps, those with less of a stake in society also put less stake in others.

Why Are Young Liberals Doing This?

We conclude by offering four possible explanations for why young liberals seem more willing to sever ties at higher rates than other groups.

• The norms of social media are now the norms of real life. Those living in upper-income urban locations tend to be early adopters of new forms of technology, social media included. These people are also more often politically liberal. Could it be that young liberals are just the first generation to apply the norms of social media (unfriending, blocking, reporting) to face-to-face relationships?
• Progressive liberals have become extremist. Another interpretation might be that higher education and cable news media have radicalized mainstream Democrat party politics into a litany of virtue-signaling slogans along with countless critiques about just about everything in society from religion to the nuclear family. As with any extremist group, such individuals tend to be intolerant, moralistic, censorious, and afraid—and so all too eager to cut out friends and family who don’t conform.
• Progressive liberals have already been ostracized from family and friends. Possibly, young liberals are already ostracized or distant from their family. For reasons yet to be explored, perhaps liberals have weaker pre-existing family ties which, in turn, make it easier for them to sever ties in the future. This is an intriguing possibility, though if true, we’d need to know more about why young liberals have such weak family relationships in the first place. Research suggests that liberals are less likely to marry, have fewer children, and are more likely to come from divorced families than their conservative counterparts.^12, 13
• Progressive liberals are just more capable of self-actualizing and prioritizing “self-care.” Another possibility is that young liberals are more enlightened than others about the importance of prioritizing their own preferences and points of view. At first glance, it would seem that severing ties with friends and family is a bad thing, but we do not know what the specific context of these relationships were; young liberals might be leaving dysfunctional relationships that moderates and conservatives wouldn’t have the self-respect to leave. If so, this opens up a further series of questions about when close ties ought to be severed, and what benefits people might get from doing so.

The dissolution of close friendship and family ties is not yet a focal area of scientific study. For this reason, we should not be place too much confidence in the explanations offered above for why we observed what we did. Close relationships can help us feel connected and safe, but they can also be demanding, difficult and feel unfairly obligatory. Might liberals be justified in their willingness to sever ties with family and friends at such elevated rates? If so, why? And if this behavior is, instead, just damaging and unnecessary, what self-inflicted harms are young liberals enduring?

To that end we offer a caveat about our (and others’) data related to this topic. It is possible that findings like the ones above reflect what statisticians call a period effect, or a misleading snapshot of a much more complex phenomenon. Possibly, only more recently have liberals become likely to sever ties than are conservatives, because of the recent political dominance of democrat administrations, most notably during the popular Obama terms. Culture and institutions during that period in America may have shifted leftward, and thus young liberals today grew up in a leftwing world and may, as a result, view their political dominance as something to be taken for granted. Disagreeing with them about politics risks incurring their wrath, not because of a difference of opinion, but rather because they see anyone who disagrees as an irrelevant MAGA bigot on the “wrong side of history.”

If this “period effect” interpretation is correct, however, then with two Trump terms in 12 years, America might be sliding rightward in its cultural and institutional impulses. Perhaps, then, those growing up in America today will be feel more emboldened as right-wing adults to end relationships with others over politics in the years to come.

Another possible confounding issue to be considered in future research is that moderates and conservatives might just be less likely to have liberals as friends or family members in the first place. This will be an easy thing to assess in our next survey, but the present data cannot resolve it. So, as of now, we cannot know for sure if liberals were more willing to sever ties simply because they had ties to sever with non-liberals. If moderates and conservatives tend more often to befriend and reproduce one another, they might sever ties with liberals less often simply because they don’t know that many.

Leaving these caveats aside, we can probably presume at least that, at this moment in time, our findings are indeed pointing to something real and that young liberals are more likely to sever ties with friends and family over politics than are moderates or conservatives. This stands as one of most important trends for social scientists to continue to better understand.