The Great Divide (Divided electorate)

The Great Divide Divided electorate is a natural for a bitter, issueless campaign

President Bush spent more money this March than any other candidate ever spent in one month -- almost $50 million. Most Americans didn't see this campaign, because in 2004, the presidential election isn't a national contest. The money Bush and his Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry, are spending goes to just 18 states.

Bush and Kerry are campaigning in the dwindling number of counties where Democrats and Republicans mix in nearly even numbers, according to an Austin American-Statesman study of election returns.

In the country's 18 battleground states, 41 percent of voters live in counties where the difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000 was 10 percentage points or less.

In non-battleground states -- the 32 states and the District of Columbia that are all but ignored by Bush and Kerry -- only 25 percent of the voters live in competitive counties.

As the number of competitive communities dwindles, there are fewer voters who can be swayed by rhetoric, policy or debates. In turn, campaigns have grown more locally focused and bitter, a strategy aimed more at turning out supporters and less at collecting swing voters.

The paradox of American politics is that as presidential elections have become closer nationally, the results locally have grown further apart. In 2000, 105 million people voted, and only a half-million ballots separated Gore and Bush. The candidates were within 10 percentage points of each other in just 772 counties out of more than 3,100.

The majority of these politically competitive counties are in the 18 states where Bush and Kerry are conducting their presidential campaigns today, according to an analysis conducted by the Statesman's statistical consultant, Robert Cushing.

Only six states have a majority of voters living in counties where both parties were competitive in 2000: New Hampshire, Nevada, Iowa, Maine, New Mexico and Florida. Even some battleground states are highly polarized. Tennessee, for example, had fewer competitive counties than the national average in 2000, but the state is politically balanced between a highly Democratic west and a very Republican east. In most of the country, presidential candidates face an electorate sorted into communities that have voted consistently Republican or Democratic for a generation.

The tendency of communities to be mostly Republican or Democratic "is probably one of the things that's driving our politics into a more polarized situation," says Paul Maslin, Howard Dean's pollster in the Democratic presidential primary.

"It's calcifying our politics," Maslin says. As regions become wedded to one party, Maslin says, there is "less true competition . . . going on for those voters. And, again, that contributes to polarization, not only on the electoral level but on the legislative level, as well. The whole thing is a mess."

The trend toward more politically segregated communities began sometime in the 1970s. When Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976, 46 percent of all voters nationally lived in counties where the presidential election was decided by 10 percent or less.

In the 1992 contest between Bill Clinton and President George H.W. Bush, 36 percent of American voters lived in competitive communities.

By 2000, only 25 percent lived in these politically mixed counties -- and just eight states had an electorate as politically integrated as the national average 24 years earlier.

As communities become increasingly partisan, the parties are less interested in persuading undecided voters. The parties are most concerned with turning out their local super-majorities of Republicans and Democrats. And the best way to do that is to spur on a politics of partisanship, ideology and division.

"It makes campaigns more ideological," Republican demographer John Morgan, Sr., says of the nation's lopsided politics. "You can't help it."

With communities becoming strongly Democratic or Republican, "you better damn well be sure you maximize your votes, whether it's inner city African Americans or suburban conservative Republicans," says Democrat Maslin. "We have to maximize our base, and they have to maximize their base. Ergo, polarization."

Voters clustered in like-minded communities have caused candidates to develop new campaign techniques. Instead of broad appeals, presidential campaigns now "narrowcast" their message, says Washington-based political analyst Stuart Rothenberg.

Campaigns "want to carve out these smaller niches, and then you add them up (to)get a whole big political party, the whole electorate." As communities become increasingly Republican or increasingly Democratic, Rothenberg says, "it probably makes it easier to target communities."

As a result, there is no national campaign for the presidency. Neither party spent money on national advertising in 2000, says Michael Hagen, director of the Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University. "It was all bought at the local level," Hagen says. "And so it obviously was a more narrowly targeted campaign than any presidential campaign had been before.

"When you start chopping up an electorate narrowly and narrowcasting messages to them, you create smaller societies that see themselves as separate," Rothenberg says. "It destroys the sense of community and common interests and values. It makes it a lot easier to see your opponent in caricature terms, as not entirely patriotic or caring about old people. Each party uses these ridiculous stereotypes. . . .

"That does fit with an electorate and a country that is increasingly fractured."

Rothenberg's description also fits with a 2004 campaign that seems more concerned with the divisive events of Vietnam and protests from the 1970s than questions facing the nation today. Social scientists have persistently found that turnout among those who feel partisanly Republican or Democratic is higher than for those who consider themselves independents. And Ohio State University political psychologist Jon Krosnick has said that turnout is highest when voters "like one candidate and hate another."

Psychologists have known for some time that as people become less likely to encounter those with opposing ideas, their politics tends to move away from the middle and toward the extreme.

In the 1950s, political scientist John Fenton puzzled over the political differences between Ohio and other industrialized states such as Michigan.

Michigan politics were partisan, ideological and keenly divided, Fenton observed. In Ohio, politics was dull and the voters lacked conviction. Fenton concluded the difference between the two states had to do with where people lived.

Michigan had tightly clustered working-class neighborhoods. People lived near those who had the same kind of job, the same level of income and the same ideology. They took their politics seriously, and they were partisanly Democratic.

Similarly, enclaves of middle-class managers were just as partisanly Republican. These richer, more conservative neighborhoods were fertile recruiting grounds for the chamber of commerce or, in some cases, the John Birch Society.

In Ohio, however, the social classes lacked cohesion. Factory workers lived next to shop owners and field hands. Fenton wrote that the "effect of a diffusion of the working population, as opposed to their concentration, on attitudes and voting behavior was profound." People didn't feel strongly about candidates or parties. People's "social isolation" from others in their class produced weakly held beliefs and a politics that lacked ideology or partisanship.

The lesson Fenton learned is now generally accepted by social psychologists: People with like-minded beliefs living in the same community "can lead to a kind of monolithic, overconfident support for a single party," explains University of Maryland political scientist James Gimpel. Moreover, Gimpel says, these groups tend to grow more extreme in their beliefs.

Polls conducted for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in 2000 and again in 2002, for example, found rural voters grew more ideologically conservative on issues such as abortion and gun control -- and they became much more supportive of Republican candidates.

Since the 1970s, the number of people living in politically monolithic communities nationally has increased by 69 percent, according to an analysis by Cushing.

By the 2000 election, 45.3 percent of all U.S. voters lived in counties where the presidential candidate won by more than 20 percent of the vote. Sixty percent of all American voters lived in counties that have voted consistently Republican or Democratic for nearly a generation.

Since the mid-1970s, American communities have become Balkanized and partisan. In the past 25 years the United States has become much more like polarized Michigan of the 1950s and a whole lot less like homogenous Ohio.

One of the ironies of democracy is that citizens who see both sides of an issue are less likely to vote and become politically active than those people who are angry, partisan and unsympathetic to those who think differently.

"In order to actually participate actively in politics you've got to feel pretty sure of yourself, and if you're just in the middle on things you seldom do," explains University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana Mutz. "Living among like-minded people who, essentially, reinforce your beliefs really spurs people on to become politically active."

The super political majorities that have appeared in most U.S. communities have set off a social, psychological snowball. Communities attract more like-minded members looking for places where they feel socially and culturally comfortable. (Or, perhaps, they chase out those with differing beliefs.) Political majorities increase, as they have in the majority of communities.

Surrounded by like-minded members of the community, people become more extreme in their thinking. As local majorities grow, people in the minority are less likely to vote.

Majorities grow stronger in number and in the certainty of their beliefs. Minorities become less vocal and less likely to participate. The process reinforces itself, and the nation's politics grow more divided, calcified and partisan.

Presidential campaigns have to deal with this geographically polarized electorate. They are shaping their campaigns accordingly.

"Look, you hunt ducks where the ducks are," says Republican consultant Scott Reed. "And so you attempt to put your base together. Get it up to 45 to 47 percent range with the right issues and then you figure out how to get across the finish line."

Both parties have become obsessive about turnout. Republicans have a Voter Vault, and the Democrats have built their Datamart, each containing information on 168 million voters. Both parties will use sophisticated marketing data to target groups of voters with direct mail and cable television advertisements.

Democrats did a better job than Republicans in 2000 in turning out voters, so Republicans formed what it calls its 72-Hour Task Force to pull people to the polls.

"All this new emphasis on turnout is perfectly consistent with the trends you're highlighting," says the University of Maryland's Gimpel. "If we do see an electorate that is more polarized, we are probably going to see a campaign that is less oriented toward persuasiveness and more oriented toward just old-fashioned mobilization and turnout. And clearly that's what we're seeing."

The problem for candidates is that the country is polarized along a range of subjects. In the 1950s Michigan voters were divided on primarily economic issues. Today's candidates face voters who have roped off positions on race, religion, abortion, gay marriage, the war in Iraq and stem-cell research.

"The old game was safer," says Paul Maslin. "Let's just go for the middle and to hell with everybody else . . . If I had to say one true statement about the entire process you are describing at the national or state level, it's making life increasingly difficult for people who are trying to thread the needle, to find the swing voter."

Since the mid-1970s, when Democrats and Republicans were more likely to live in the same communities, American politics changed. Parties aligned with economic and social issues. Communities became predominantly Republican or Democratic. The number of voters in the middle declined.

"Now you are in a different game and a much more dangerous game," Maslin says. "You've got to appeal to the base, but at the same time you still have to make some kind of breakthrough to the other guy's turf. And yet you know you run the risk of every time you run in one direction you lose the other ones."

The conservative backlash to President Bush's more liberal immigration proposals was just the kind of danger politicians face in this new world.

"My hunch is that it's just going to continue in the 2004 election," says Harvard University political scientist Eric Schickler. It's hard to reach out to new voters without alienating ones already in your camp, Schickler says. Meanwhile, "the polarization on Bush is accentuating, he says. "You have a good number of people who despise him and a good number of people who love him. And they live in different places."

Candidates are less concerned with persuasion -- since only a small percentage of voters are uncommitted or live in politically diverse communities -- and more obsessed with turnout. There is less need for debate in this kind of political environment. It's not to either candidate's benefit to confuse voters by discussing issues -- after all, people who understand the other side are less likely to vote.

Everything people and the media say they deplore about elections -- the negative advertisements and the issueless campaigns -- is exactly what a population that is both divided and geographically isolated demands.

"Isn't it interesting," Maslin says, "that in this age of the Internet and tremendous communication we were supposed to become more tolerant over time. Our fondest wishes would be that, like Rodney King, we'd all be getting along and coming together. When, in fact, in a bizarre sense even though the threads connect us, we may be driving ourselves apart."

Hard to know where to begin. Let's start with Bill Bishop's contention at the beginning of the article that this is an "issueless" campaign.

Has he been paying ANY attention to what Bush and Kerry have been saying? Has he ANY clue what the real issues in this "issueless" campaign are? (I know, I know, he writes for the Austin-American Statesman; an uber-liberal rag that is second only to the NYSlimes).

But, then, he closes with this:
"Isn't it interesting," Maslin says, "that in this age of the Internet and tremendous communication we were supposed to become more tolerant over time. Our fondest wishes would be that, like Rodney King, we'd all be getting along and coming together. When, in fact, in a bizarre sense even though the threads connect us, we may be driving ourselves apart."

"WE MAY BE DRIVING OURSELVES APART"!!!??? Does Maslin ever listen to the class warfare, race-baiting arguments of the left? What a maroon!!

"Isn't it interesting," Maslin says, "that in this age of the Internet and tremendous communication we were supposed to become more tolerant over time...."

Maybe this is why there are so many more people voting for the Republicans. Many people are fed up with the daily lies from the media.

Pretty easy one side mostly supports our enemies and one side does not. which side should win?

I vote for the side that does not support our enemies.

I agree with this as well. Like President Bush said after 9/11, "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." John F'ing Kerry and his supporters are with the terrorists.

The problem being the concept of "one man one vote." It all flows from egalitarianism: equal 'rights' for all, dialogue, debate, different points of view, the big tent, room at the table, all have dignity etc. etc.

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