Fewer Americans say they would welcome a political opponent into the family, FSU survey finds

By Celeste Varga

WASHINGTON — With a week to go before Election Day, here is a question for the dinner table that may be more fraught than the ballot: would you welcome a political opponent into the family?

Fewer Americans say yes than did a year ago, according to a report released this month by Florida State University’s Institute for Governance and Civics. In a July survey of 1,067 adults conducted through Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, 45 percent said they were willing to have someone with opposing political views marry into their family, down from 52 percent in the institute’s May–June 2025 survey. The share flatly unwilling rose from 14 percent to 19 percent. Another 36 percent said they would allow it but would prefer it not happen — the in-law equivalent of a polite smile across the turkey.

Dating, curiously, held steady. In both years, 41 percent said they would date someone with opposing views, 29 percent would but would rather not, and 30 percent would not. Apparently Americans will share a bottle of wine with the other side; they just do not want to share a last name.

The young are the least forgiving

The sharpest change came among adults ages 18 to 29. In 2026, 26 percent of them said they were unwilling both to date someone across the aisle and to have such a person marry into the family, up from 9 percent in 2025, the report says. Only 37 percent of young adults were fully willing to accept a political opponent as an in-law, compared with 44 to 52 percent of older groups.

The extremes are where romance goes to die. In the July survey, 69 percent of “extremely liberal” respondents said they would not date someone with opposing views, compared with 43 percent of “extremely conservative” respondents. Moderates were the most open, at 52 percent willing.

Read the fine print

The authors, Zach Goldberg, Ryan Owens and James L. Woodworth, are careful about what the comparison can show. The 2025 survey used SSRS’s Opinion Panel and the 2026 survey used Ipsos, so some of the change “could reflect differences in panel composition or survey procedures rather than changes in public attitudes,” they write. The decline on the marriage question persisted after adjusting for differences between the samples, and the stable dating results make it “difficult to dismiss the marriage result as entirely due to differences in who answered the surveys.” The 2026 survey’s margin of error was plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

The report’s conclusion is less playful than this column. When people avoid those who disagree with them, the authors write, those people “can become easier to caricature or dehumanize.”

For Washington, where politics is both the job and the small talk, the findings land close to home. A practical suggestion, offered free of charge: if your date and your mother vote differently, perhaps let them meet after Nov. 3.

The Inquisitor is seeking comment from the report’s authors, FSU University Communications, Ipsos, the Kinsey Institute and Match.