The first significant drop in party support came after the South Carolina primary in 2016. And what happened there? Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders 73-26. And that drop came almost entirely from young, white Democrats who swung a net 19-points against their party.

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Check out the comparable chart among young African Americans. We may hate to talk about it, it may be ugly, but we can’t ignore the racial divisions generated by our primary.

The party did rally somewhat in the wake of Clinton clinching the primary, but losing the election gave the party a well-deserved black eye. (Even if now, we see how the Russians and GOP conspired to win an election, in a crazy system where the loser gets to move into the White House.) And while party faves have inched up since the election, they’re still not at the levels we saw before the primary.

Interestingly, the racial divisions show up most strongly when looking at younger voters. Among all ages, party support is pretty uniform. Among African Americans it’s 79-7, Latinos 76-11 and among whites, it’s 77-11. (Those numbers make a mockery of news stories claiming party discontent among communities of color.) But look what happens when we look at only 18-34 year olds:

Young Latinos have consistently had lower support for the party during the time we’ve tracked, whether from the Obama Administration’s deportation policies, weakness on DACA, or something else. But that party discontent among young whites is closely correlated with the rise of Bernie Sanders. It’s clear damage was done in that primary, and it’s damage that remains to this very day.

And yet despite much of the sturm und drang over these divisions, it’s also important to note that the party is pretty darn popular among self-identified supporters! So what accounts to all the loud bickering we see constantly?

It could mean that the loudest dissonant voices are exaggerating the divisions that genuinely exist. Or it could be that the loudest liberal critics (like Sanders) are self-identifying as Independents. Regardless, among those who call themselves Democrats, the party is in relatively good shape. Not as good as before the 2016 primaries, but in better shape than the current GOP.

Additional miscellaneous notes:

Older African Americans (65 and over), at 91-5, are the strongest party supporters. There is no difference between older black men or women. They clock in at virtually identical numbers. They are the backbone of the Democratic Party.