Fact check: What percentage of republicans and democrats do not have a high school diploma or better as of 2025 (grouped by party)?

1. Why the claim can’t be confirmed: missing direct data

None of the supplied analyses includes a direct percentage of Republicans or Democrats who lack a high‑school diploma or equivalent in 2025. The Religious Landscape Study material focuses on religion and methodology and explicitly contains no demographic breakdown by education and party that would answer this question ^[1]. Several items discuss the partisan composition of non‑college voters or the “diploma divide” in broader terms, but that category conflates people with high‑school diplomas and those without them; it therefore cannot be used to isolate the population without a high‑school credential ^{[2] [6]}. Scholarly work on elite education in Congress likewise centers on college and elite institutions, not high‑school completion among the electorate ^[3]. The net effect is a data gap: the supplied sources are relevant to education‑partisanship relationships but not to the precise figure requested.

2. What the closest available evidence shows and its limits

The closest evidence in the provided analyses are exit‑poll style summaries reporting that a nontrivial share of voters “never attended college,” and the partisan lean of that group: one summary states 15% of respondents never attended college, with 62% of that group identifying as Republicans and 36% as Democrats ^[5]. That statistic addresses college attendance, not high‑school completion, and so cannot be translated directly into the share lacking a high‑school diploma. Other pieces describe how voters without college degrees skew Republican and how elite educated Democrats differ from Republicans in Congress, but those are about degree attainment and elite educational status rather than basic completion of high school ^{[2] [6]}. Using those statistics to infer high‑school noncompletion would risk substantial misclassification and overstatement.

3. Conflicting framings and possible agendas in the materials

The materials frame educational differences in partisan terms in several ways: some emphasize the Republican advantage among non‑college voters, others focus on Democratic gains among college‑educated voters, and academic work spotlights congressional elites. Those different framings serve different narratives — electoral coalitions vs. elite composition — and each carries a potential agenda toward emphasizing either working‑class Republican strength or elite Democratic ascendancy. For example, a Gallup‑style analysis highlighting non‑college white voters’ GOP identification underscores working‑class partisan loyalty, while scholarship on elite universities in Congress highlights institutional recruitment and status ^{[2] [3]}. None of the sources, however, directly measures the low‑education tail (no high‑school diploma) by party, so these agendas are operating on adjacent but not identical facts.

4. How to get the precise answer and why typical proxies mislead

To produce a defensible 2025 percentage of Republicans and Democrats without a high‑school diploma requires a dataset that records both party identification and highest educational attainment with a fine‑grained category for “less than high school.” The supplied items do not contain that cross‑tabulation; exit polls and partisan fact sheets report college vs. non‑college splits or broader educational trends but lack “less than high school” by party ^{[4] [7]}. Using college‑attainment splits, “never attended college,” or elite‑education measures as proxies will misstate the low‑education share because those categories mix high‑school graduates with non‑graduates. Any exact percentage must come from a source that explicitly cross‑tabs party ID with high‑school completion status.

5. Bottom line for your original claim and recommended next steps

Bottom line: the claim asking “What percentage of Republicans and Democrats do not have a high school diploma or better as of 2025?” cannot be validated or answered with the supplied materials; the evidence is insufficient and oriented to different educational measures ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]}. To resolve the question, obtain a source that cross‑tabulates party identification with the specific educational category ‘less than high school’ for 2025 — for example, national surveys or exit‑poll datasets that report that specific cell. Given the absence of such a cell in the provided analyses, any numeric answer would be speculative rather than evidentiary.