Congress hasn’t been this polarized in decades — since scholars developed objective methods of measuring lawmakers’ voting records. Twenty years ago, there was a significant number of Democrats who were more conservative than the most liberal Republican in Congress, and vice versa. Now there’s no ideological overlap between the two parties.

Political journalists often blame this sorry state of affairs on congressional “dysfunction” (while too often failing to note that Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats have shifted to the left.)

But a new study by the Pew Research Center suggests that ordinary voters are almost as sharply divided as the lawmakers who represent them. The authors write, “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines — and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive — than at any point in the last two decades. These trends manifest themselves in myriad ways, both in politics and in everyday life.”