How do political leanings shape visual engagement with politically charged content? Here, we report the results of the first large-scale eye-tracking study on a politically and demographically diverse sample. We find that while Democrats and Republicans tend to focus on the same objects—giving more attention to personalized depictions of a polarizing issue, which they view more positively, and less attention to depersonalized depictions, seen as more negative—Democrats spend significantly more overall time fixating on political visuals than Republicans. This suggests that although both groups pay attention to the same visual objects, they engage differently with the broader context of these images. We further show that these differences in visual engagement mediate partisanship's effect on attitudes, revealing a yet unexplored pathway through which visual processing may contribute to attitude polarization. Our results remain robust across different study waves, image selections, measures of partisanship and ideology, and participant devices.