Is the American electorate hopelessly divided? The New York Times’ John Tierney waded into those waters yesterday, asking “Do Americans really despise the beliefs of half of their fellow citizens?”
The answer, says Tierney, who relies on analyses by various political scholars, is no. “…[T]he polarized nation is largely a myth created by people inside the Beltway talking to each other or, more precisely, shouting at each other,” Tierney writes.
As regular readers of Campaign Desk know, reporter Bill Bishop at the Austin American-Statesman has also examined this issue in an exceptional series entitled The Great Divide, analyzing national voting trends since 1948. (Links to Campaign Desk reports on the series can be found here, here, here and here.)
Based on election returns, Bishop, who is most decidedly not “inside the Beltway,” concludes that increasingly many Americans live in politically segregated communities, where free discourse about politics is a thing of the past. And, when like-minded people cluster together, he writes, views tend to polarize and become more extreme. In response, elected officials move even further to the fringes, hoping to win the support of the true believers.
Are Tierney and Bishop at odds on the issue? At first glance, yes, but Tierney offers this telling conclusion: “[I]t’s not the voters but the political elite of both parties who have become more narrow-minded and polarized.”
Most voters are still centrists, who long more for centrist candidates than they do for frothing-at-the-mouth partisans, writes Tierney, “but they rarely get the chance.” Centrists just don’t fight their way on to the ballot much these days, be it a ballot in a presidential election or a local contest.
Tierney quotes from a forthcoming book, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America by Samuel J. Abrams of Harvard University and Jeremy C. Pope of Stanford University: “Reports of a [political] culture war are mostly wishful thinking and useful fund-raising strategies on the part of the culture war guerrillas, abetted by a media driven by the need to make the dull and everyday appear exciting and unprecedented.”
Writes Tierney: “As moderates have become an endangered species in Congress and in state legislatures, the parties’ ideological divisions have deepened, and voters have realigned in response. Many moderate liberals who used to call themselves Republicans no longer do, while many moderate conservatives have left the Democratic Party. The result is greater partisanship, because each party is purer ideologically. But does that mean that voters as a whole are polarized as well?”
Not necessarily, concludes Tierney, although “mainstream voters may be pulled to the extremes.” His article is accompanied by a poll from the Pew Center showing that a plurality of voters — about 33 percent — still fall smack dab in the middle of the political spectrum, and that group outnumbers both those to the right and those to the left.
In an election where we are pelted almost daily by polling data, and rabid political spinmeisters are painting Campaign 2004 as another Battle of Gettysburg, the reasoned analyses of Bill Bishop and John Tierney are welcome respites from the storm.
–Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.