Purple America
ROBINSON, MICHAEL & ELLIS, SUSAN
Purple America Forget polarization—the country is really an even mix of blue and red. BY MICHAEL ROBINSON & SUSAN ELLIS On June 1, Stephanie Herseth, a true-blue Democrat, won a special election...
...What about in years past...
...We suspect that if the Democrats were still the majority party and still controlled Congress and the presidency, the professoriate and the press would probably consider these changes to represent good, responsible government, not dreaded polarization...
...Why can't the Republicans get 100 percent—instead of the actual 80 percent—of Bush's judicial appointments confirmed...
...One can look west and see a reddish Virginia...
...George W. Bush didn't break a sweat to win in hot and humid Louisiana in 2000, but in 2004 all three statewide leaders are Democrats...
...For Democrats and Republicans, the new polarization is akin to the old partisanship...
...The watchword then and now is centrism...
...Journalists aren't the only ones barking...
...Adults should prefer something more adult, but no more sensational...
...That hasn't happened...
...It was great for television that the blue states and the red states seemed to be oh-so-regionalized...
...Pew asks, "In general, would you describe yourself as very conservative, conservative, moderate, liberal, or very liberal...
...Drive the Oklahoma panhandle into the Sun Belt, Michael Robinson retired from the government department at Georgetown University in 1993 and serves as a consultant to the Pew Research Center...
...Then there is the tyranny of "Map 2000"—the unfortunate byproduct of Electoral College realities and television's ongoing standard operating procedures...
...In 1860, one-third of the states were on their way to becoming the Confederacy...
...Remember the ugliness of George Wallace's Independent party, a backlash movement that attracted nearly 10 million very hostile voters, and even garnered 46 votes in the Electoral College...
...But move 2 percent of the 20 million votes cast in the Great Lakes states and the entire region would have been red instead of two-thirds blue...
...Why else would John Kerry now oppose gay marriage and favor an additional 40,000 soldiers for the Army...
...their statewide elected leadership is a mix of red and blue...
...In the Electoral College, the states matter far more than the voters...
...How about the era of Much Too Close To Call...
...So there are four times as many moderates as "wingers"—right or left...
...In fact, about a quarter of all those questions indicated a public closely divided, while there was something approaching national consensus on a third of them...
...Think 1968...
...But calling that shift a minor realignment would be bad PR for Democrats...
...the moderate category contained 39 percent of the total...
...Every state has at least three offices elected statewide: the governor and the two senators...
...In fact, the public response to the death of Ronald Reagan implies that we are not now at war with ourselves...
...For decades liberal academics actually argued in favor of polarization...
...Political grievances in the past have spawned the Klan, the SDS, and the Nation of Islam...
...How ironic that polarization theory should become received wisdom at a time when nationalistic fervor is greater than it has been for at least a decade...
...After ten eventful years, there's been no change in how and where the public positions itself...
...So we ought not to be too melodramatic in the labeling...
...Susan Ellis is a senior analyst at Market Strategies, Inc., in Livonia, Michigan...
...In 1960, Americans were evenly divided, at least as to presidential preference...
...California is blue, so we won't, as the Californi-ans say, go there...
...The Map has become the single most indelible metaphor in contemporary electoral politics...
...Leaders in both parties have their own reasons for pushing the polarization theme...
...Had less than half of one percent of the total West Coast vote shifted to Bush, two of the three Pacific coast states would have turned the networks' bright red...
...The exact same percentage said "very liberal...
...The "50-50" politics of this decade do not...
...Let's see how far one can go into the Red Belt and still find blue governors...
...Americans recognize full well that their real enemy comes not from an American state that is either red or blue...
...Gore did carry all three states, but not nearly as dramatically as the coloring implied...
...America was not equally divided then, but she was most certainly polarized...
...For decades white southerners have gravitated toward the Republicans...
...The theory of red states versus blue states is about as wide of the mark as it is widely accepted...
...Yet only 16 states have a political triumvirate that is monochromatic and matches the state's Campaign 2000 color...
...And yet once-red New Mexico now has a very blue governor, Bill Richardson...
...So the lion's share of conservatives are now in the conservative party...
...Republicans have their own motives for embracing the myth of polarized politics...
...Political "blue flu" infects both Dakotas...
...Big mistake...
...BY MICHAEL ROBINSON & SUSAN ELLIS On June 1, Stephanie Herseth, a true-blue Democrat, won a special election for the lone House seat in the blood-red state of South Dakota...
...In fact, New York has not elected a Democratic governor since Mario Cuomo in 1990...
...Rhode Island hasn't elected a Democratic governor for 14 years...
...Even the press has a self-serving motive for hyping polarization...
...And what about the other blue states...
...But it isn't new and it isn't news...
...Are they as faithless to their party as the red states we just visited...
...Better to call the phenomenon Polarization...
...Consider the politically charged year of 1994, when Newt Gingrich rose from obscurity to become the first Republican speaker of the House in four decades...
...So it must be the newly polarized political environment that's to blame...
...which for 40 years has been considered not just sunny but solidly Republican...
...What about The People...
...The Gore Coast was a graphics-driven exaggeration...
...So much for The States...
...The 1860s and the late 1960s epitomized genuine political polarization...
...Polarization is not a modest increase in differences between Democrats and Republicans...
...In a word, yes...
...How can this be happening in a political environment that is assumed to be polarized state by state, region by region...
...The wings accounted for 10 percent of the public at large...
...Why, then, the obsession with polarization...
...The abandoned Democrats have been left with almost all of the liberals...
...That definition is both myopic and alarmist...
...Politicians know all this, even if the conventional wisdom doesn't...
...Political grievances since 2000 have given us the "Deaniacs...
...The same thing happened in the Great Lakes region...
...It's something both sides use to explain away almost anything and everything...
...The Map painted all but two of the Great Lakes states as solidly for Gore, making the North Coast appear to be Gore country...
...Indeed, seven of the ten states Al Gore won by the largest majorities all currently have Republican governors...
...But what was a 19th-century maxim remains a 21st-century reality: Politics ain't beanbag...
...But now that we do have more coherent and consistent parties—even without violence or extremism—political scientists have joined the media in decrying the changes they once advocated...
...They do all this because each realizes that for the vast majority of Americans extremism is still a vice, and moderation is still a virtue...
...Each party has done about as well as the other in attracting voters, but the voters themselves have remained middle of the road...
...The 50th state is unique...
...But Maryland has a red governor...
...The best example is the West Coast...
...Cross the Mississippi into Missouri: blue governor...
...More than 30 years ago, there was a popular slogan about the political crisis that was raging at the time: "We have met the enemy and he is us...
...Another factor here is political expediency...
...A polarized state in a polarized nation, you might think, would commonly show all three officials either red or blue...
...From the Capitol dome, one can look east into blue Maryland...
...Polarization worthy of the name involves an intensity and hostility that engenders some level of political violence, or something akin to it...
...But we checked the 50-plus items that Pew included in that survey and found the nation as a whole was not closely divided on most issues and values...
...Why else would George W. Bush have strained to pass the largest entitlement package in 40 years...
...The two senators from South Dakota are also Democrats...
...If this transformation led contemporary politics to the next level down—back into the streets or toward extremist movements—then one might be right to raise alarms about Polarization...
...So, taken together, 1860 and 1960 prove that being evenly divided is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for polarization...
...Pew's most recent and wide-ranging study of polarization, completed in 2003, finds that Democrats and Republicans now differ more widely on issues and values than at any time in the last 15 years...
...Yet Americans were not especially polarized at the time...
...Fair enough...
...In television journalism, the visuals matter way too much...
...Not a Republican in sight...
...Climb down from the Capitol and travel west by southwest, through the American version of the Red Belt...
...How, then, best to describe the politics of the last few years...
...Massachusetts hasn't elected a Democrat to its top office since Michael Dukakis in 1986...
...Travel down toward Tennessee: blue governor...
...Forty-one percent said "moderate...
...That's mainly how we became the "50-50" nation...
...Pundits and political scientists have equated "evenly divided" with "polarized...
...Why can't George Bush get his energy package adopted...
...End up in Arizona, what was once Goldwater country and is still color-coded bright red on The Map...
...Two blood-red states...
...At minimum, real polarization must produce an extremist movement with significant public support...
...Like partisanship, the specter of polarization gives the watchdog press a system-wide malfunction about which to bark...
...The best way to answer that question is to ask them...
...And he isn't us...
...Al Gore wound up winning only three states by 20 points or more: Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York...
...Democrats know that since 2001 there has been a tilt toward the GOP...
...We can expect a nasty campaign and overheated rhetoric from both sides...
...This academic establishment balked when it became clear that coherence was increasing just as the Republicans were gaining ground...
...Thirty-three states fail the test...
...Kids might call this the politics of "Even Steven...
...Still, as in any legend, there is truth here...
...For those who prefer something a bit more systematic than a travelogue, we have checked all 50 states for loyalty to their color...
...But even Valley Girls know that California just installed as chief executive Arnold Schwarzenegger—a man of many colors...
...It's a good, all-purpose excuse for a party that holds the White House and controls the Congress but can't pass much of its legislative agenda...
...The Pacific states were not nearly as solid for Gore as the colors looked...
...But in a state that gave George Bush 60 percent of its vote back in 2000, Herseth's win turns out to be the rule, not the exception...
...Still, this isn't a political picnic we're experiencing in 2004...
...In May of this year, a meager 5 percent labeled themselves "very conservative...
...There's a serious definition problem here as well...
...TV's uniformly bright-blue coloring of Oregon, Washington, and California implied that the coast was all Al Gore's...
...Again, all three are Democrats, even though Bush did even better in North Dakota than in South...
...he comes from a nation-state that has failed (like Afghanistan) or is failing (like Pakistan...
...That term characterizes Republican gains as somehow sinister, even dysfunctional...
...but Virginia has a bluish chief executive...
...The Pew Research Center has been doing just that for more than a dozen years...
...Back then, political science labeled that prospect "responsible, coherent party politics...
...Then take your pick: Kansas or Oklahoma—two longtime red states, both with recently elected blue governors...
...It can't be the fault of the Republicans...
...Two-thirds would remain in the Union...
...Yet almost nothing the public has done since Campaign 2000 could be accurately described as antipodal or extremist, let alone radical...
...But that hasn't happened either...
...The numbers from 1994 are virtually identical with those from 2004...
...But this graphic metaphor exaggerates almost everything about those politics...
...But pollsters do ask voters to describe themselves politically...
...But we have been color-blinded by The Map...
...Terminology like that is Greek to them...
...No pollster with any sense would ask people whether they see themselves as polarized...
...Six true-blue congressional Democrats...
...Arizona also has a new governor who is blue...
...The answer is that the assumption is wrong...
...Since 2001, we all know who the enemy is...
...The most important reason is an error in logic...
...All three have Republican governors...
...Polarization is mostly an urban legend, imagined by the chattering classes of the metropolitan centers of politics and media...
...If this transformation meant that neither blue voters nor red would cross the color line, then this might be cause for alarm...
...Compared with Wallace voters, Ralph Nader's 3 million voters in 2000 are few in number and very bourgeois...
...North Dakota also elects one House member along with its two senators...
Vol. 9 • August 2004 • No. 46
