Friendships, not romances, are taking the biggest hit from political division. A new peer-reviewed study out of UC Irvine finds that 37% of Americans have ended a relationship over politics at some point in their lives, and when researchers broke down what kind of relationship got cut, friendships accounted for 62% of the losses, compared with 40% for family ties, 29% for coworkers, and just 10% for romantic partnerships.
The research, led by UC Irvine psychology Ph.D. candidate Mertcan Güngör and professor Peter Ditto, was published in PNAS Nexus, the open-access companion journal to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It draws on four separate datasets totaling nearly 3,800 participants, including a national survey run with YouGov in April 2025 and a comparison of American National Election Studies data from 2020 and 2024.
The friendship finding is the piece worth sitting with, because it cuts against the instinct to assume politics mostly wrecks romance or splits families at Thanksgiving. The researchers’ explanation is structural rather than emotional: friendships sit in an unusual spot relative to other relationships in a person’s life. They’re close enough that political opinions actually come up in conversation, the way they might not with a coworker, but unlike a marriage or a sibling relationship, a friendship carries no formal commitment holding it together. There’s no shared lease, no shared kids, no family obligation forcing anyone to stay in the room. When a friendship stops feeling easy, it’s simply easier to let it go quiet.
Romantic partnerships showed the opposite pattern, and for a related reason. Only 10% of respondents said they’d ended a romantic relationship over politics, the lowest share of any category the study measured. Couples generally have more invested, housing, finances, sometimes children, which raises the cost of a political falling-out considerably compared with a friendship that might have started over a shared hobby or a college dorm hallway.
The study also found a sharp partisan asymmetry in who’s doing the breaking up. Democrats reported political breakups at nearly double the rate of Republicans, 47% versus 29%, with independents in between at 39%. Among people who did report a breakup, 66% of Democrats said they were the one who initiated it, compared with just 27% of Republicans. The researchers don’t fully explain the gap, but it tracks with other polling showing Democrats have reported higher levels of political stress and are more likely to describe politics as core to their identity in recent election cycles.
Timing matters here too. The study found that breakups tied to the 2024 election accelerated faster than those following 2016, reaching a comparable rate of reported political breakups in roughly half the time. Nearly all of the breakups people reported, across every dataset, happened in 2016 or later, suggesting this isn’t a slow-building generational shift so much as a pattern that essentially didn’t exist at scale before the last decade of American politics.
The researchers also tracked what happens to people psychologically after a political breakup, and the results suggest the relationship damage doesn’t stay contained to the one friendship or family member involved. People who reported a political breakup showed measurably higher hostility toward the opposing political side afterward, in the published data, they rated members of the opposing party roughly 7.87 degrees colder on a 100-point feeling thermometer than they rated the opposing party’s actual political candidates, and they overestimated how extreme the other side’s views were by 12 to 19 percentage points more than people who hadn’t lost a relationship over politics. Because the data is observational, the researchers are careful to note they can’t say for certain whether the hostility caused the breakup or built up afterward, but either way, the two are moving together.
None of this means political disagreement automatically dooms a friendship the way it might feel to whoever’s on the losing end of one. What the data actually shows is narrower and, in its way, more useful: friendship is the relationship type most exposed to political rupture precisely because it depends on nothing but two people continuing to choose each other, which means it’s also the relationship type where a little deliberate effort, checking in, changing the subject, deciding the friendship matters more than being right, goes furthest toward keeping it intact.
