Most examinations of the sociodemographic group foundations of political party identification and party coalitions in the United States rely on national samples (e.g., the National Election Studies). Therefore, they fail to consider (a) state-to-state variation in the group components of party identification and party coalitions and (b) how state context structures this variation. We rely on media exit polls from the 1988, 1992, and 1996 elections to examine group influences on party identification and party coalitions across the large states. Although there are common threads across the nation in Democratic and Republican support, we find significant state-to-state variation in the nature of group influences on party identification. For many sociodemographic characteristics, group size conditions the importance of the characteristic for party identification, a finding consistent with a contextual theory of political behavior. A group’s size and the partisan loyalty of its members interact to determine a group’s importance to coalition building in a state.
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