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Posted on 04/04/2004 1:02:47 PM PDT by optimistically_conservative
Since the 2000 election, pundits have emphasized that the United States is evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. Nationally, this is true.
At the local level, however, that 50-50 split disappears. In its place is a country so out of balance, so politically divided that there is little competition in presidential contests between the parties in most U.S. counties, according to an Austin American-Statesman study of election returns since 1948.
By the end of the dead-even 2000 presidential election, American communities were more lopsidedly Republican or Democratic than at any other time in the past half-century.
The geographical division found by the Statesman and its statistical consultant, Robert Cushing, is a change from the recent past. From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, U.S. counties became more and more politically mixed, based on presidential voting. Through the 1950s and '60s, Americans were more likely to live in a community with a relatively even mixture of Republicans and Democrats.
In 1976, when Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford by only 2 percentage points, 26.8 percent of American voters lived in counties with landslide presidential election results, where one party had 60 percent or more of the vote.
Twenty-four years and six presidential elections later, when George Bush and Al Gore were virtually tied nationally, 45.3 percent of all voters lived in a landslide county. And now the nation enters a new election year divided both ideologically and geographically in ways few can remember.
On average, voters are less likely today to live in a community that has an even mix of Republican and Democratic voters than at any time since World War II. They are less likely to live near someone with a different political point of view and are more likely to live in a political atmosphere either overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic.
"I don't think we are at a really dangerous stage," said Cass Sunstein, a professor of law at the University of Chicago. "But if it's a case that people really are pretty rigidly Republican or Democratic, and that's widespread, that's not healthy. Our democracy is supposed to be one where people learn from one another and listen."
Sunstein's concern is rooted in more than 300 social science research efforts over the past 40 years that have found a striking phenomenon when like-minded people cluster: They tend to become more extreme in their thinking. They polarize.
This research predicted that the increasing physical segregation of voters in the United States would result in a more polarized and partisan political culture. And that is exactly what is happening.
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press late last year examined public opinion polls back to 1987 and found that the United States "remains a country that is almost evenly divided politically — yet further apart than ever in its political values."
In mid-March, the Gallup poll found that 91 percent of Republicans approved of President Bush's job performance, while only 17 percent of Democrats felt likewise. The gap between Republican and Democratic support for an incumbent — 74 percentage points — was the largest Gallup has ever observed at that point in a presidential election year.
Highly partisan presidential politics isn't the only sign of political segregation. As counties become more politically pure, they push their representatives in state legislatures and Congress to more extreme positions. Legislative compromise becomes more difficult. Meanwhile, election campaigns become less interested in convincing a dwindling number of undecided voters and more concerned with whipping up the enthusiasm of their most partisan backers.
Since the early and mid-1970s, the American political scene shifted dramatically from the independent-minded, ticket-splitting, nonpartisan landscape documented 30 years ago by Washington Post political reporter David Broder in a book titled, "The Party's Over."
• Voters have grown more partisan.
Party loyalties rebounded in the 1980s and '90s. Since 1980, party loyalty has increased to levels "unsurpassed over any comparable time span since the turn of the last century," writes Princeton University political scientist Larry Bartels. The percentage of people who see important differences between the parties went from 46 percent in 1972 to 66 percent in 2000.
• The parties have become more ideological.
The percentage of conservatives who call themselves Democrats, and liberals who call themselves Republicans, has been declining since 1972. The two parties once were a stew of conflicting ideologies — mixtures that included northern liberal Republicans and conservative rural Democrats. Now they are growing more ideologically pure.
• Congress compromises less often.
Despite the rancor caused by war and the civil rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were fewer strict party-line votes in those years than at any time since World War II. Since then, the number of times a majority of Republicans in Congress have voted opposite a majority of Democrats has steadily increased. The percentage of these party-line votes in the 1990s was higher than for any 10-year period since 1950, and the parties "differ more on issues now than at any time since the early days of the New Deal," wrote Colby College political scientist Mark Brewer.
• Voters cast more straight party tickets.
In the 2000 and 2002 elections, ticket splitting — where voters cast ballots for both Republicans and Democrats — "declined to the lowest levels in over 30 years," according to University of Missouri-St. Louis political scientist David Kimball.
A gradual switch
Los Angeles County, Calif., was Republican from 1948 through the end of the Reagan administration in 1988. The only blip was a vote for Johnson in the 1964 landslide election.
The elections were close, however. The 1960 Kennedy/Nixon contest was a toss-up in Los Angeles County, just like the rest of the country.
But since Los Angeles tipped toward the Democrats in 1988, the county has grown more and more Democratic. In the 50-50 election of 2000, 66 percent of the voters in L.A. were for Al Gore.
What happened in L.A. is typical of what's happening in thousands of U.S. counties.
Counties tip to one party or another, staying with that party election after election. Republican counties, on average, are becoming more Republican. Democratic counties are becoming more Democratic, according to the Statesman's analysis of more than 50 years of presidential voting results.
There aren't just a few counties that have tipped Democratic or Republican. Most American voters live in counties with presidential party preferences that haven't changed in a generation, according to Cushing's analysis. And the majorities in those counties are growing.
In metro Atlanta, such trends are more difficult to spot, in part because native son Jimmy Carter attracted unusual numbers of Democratic votes in 1976 and 1980, and Southerner Bill Clinton did the same — but to a lesser degree — in 1992 and 1996. The area's largest county, Fulton, has remained fairly competitive since World War II, never delivering more than 60 percent of its votes for one party, except for the Carter years. Al Gore won the county with 58 percent in 2000.
The area's second-largest county, DeKalb, has become a landslide county. DeKalb was competitive, but it delivered GOP victories from 1964 to 1984, not including the Carter elections. But starting in 1988, when it tipped to the Democrats, it has grown steadily more Democratic, giving Gore 70 percent in 2000.
Across the country, 60 percent of Republican voters live in counties that have voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 1980. Sixty percent of the Democratic voters live in counties that have voted for the Democratic candidate in every election since 1988.
"If you don't have anyone in your network of associates who thinks the least bit different from you, then it's pretty easy to grow confident in the correctness of your views," said University of Maryland political demographer James Gimpel. "There is no opportunity in those . . . neighborhoods for dissonance to arise. And so by keeping dissonance out, you wind up gravitating toward a more extreme political position. This is one explanation for the increase in ideology you see not only in the public, but in Congress."
Eric Sundquist of the Journal-Constitution contributed material for this article.
We are now more segregated than ever.
Yes. But, why then are University faculties more than 90% Democratic? And why is Hollywood and the mass media overwhelmingly Democratic?
I often wonder what it's like for democrats in a red area or state....although I know there are self-righteous people on both sides, I imagine we are not quite as hostile as they.
Sunstein's concern is rooted in more than 300 social science research efforts over the past 40 years that have found a striking phenomenon when like-minded people cluster: They tend to become more extreme in their thinking. They polarize.This research predicted that the increasing physical segregation of voters in the United States would result in a more polarized and partisan political culture. And that is exactly what is happening.
Are you working with Al Queda? Your first attack in NYC worked pretty good.
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