You're Thinking About Polarization All Wrong
Membership in the blue and the red tribes is more fluid than it seems.
When you read a newspaper or watch television these days, it feels as though America is divided into two immovable and mutually inimical blocs: blue America and red America, the half of the country that will cast its vote to re-elect Joe Biden in November and the half of the country that will cast its vote to re-elect Donald Trump.
A look at the last three presidential elections seems to confirm that impression. In none of them was the margin between the Democratic and the Republican candidate more than five percentage points. In 2016, switching just 40,000 votes across three states would have sufficed to hand victory to Hillary Clinton; in 2020, switching the same number of votes across four states would have done the same for Donald Trump.
Given how deeply polarized America is, it is tempting to compare the country to Northern Ireland or Bosnia-Herzegovina—to places, that is, where how your father voted twenty years ago reliably tells me how you vote today and how your child is likely to vote twenty years hence. But that is simply wrong.
Yes, over the past dozen years American politics has been highly competitive: by historical standards, national elections have been unusually close-run. But over the same time period, American politics has also been extremely fluid: a very large number of voters have changed parties. They have moved from Democrat to Republican, or from Republican to Democrat, or from the ranks of non-voters to either, and so on. It’s just that the different streams of this mass migration have, at least so far, roughly canceled each other out, creating the false appearance of a country divided into two stable blocs.
The easiest way to demonstrate the magnitude of the movement between different camps is to look at the remarkable changes in voting patterns among different demographic groups. As Ruy Teixeira recently pointed out at The Liberal Patriot, Barack Obama lost white college graduates by 7 points in 2012; according to the latest New York Times poll, which made big headlines just over a week ago, Biden can expect to carry this demographic by a comfortable 15-point margin in November.
To the Democrats’ chagrin, this massive change in the electoral orientation of white college graduates is eclipsed by an even larger change in the partisan alignment of nonwhite voters who did not attend college. Obama carried this demographic by a staggering 67 percentage points; according to the NYT poll, Biden will carry this group by a mere 6 points.
The change in American voting patterns turns out to be more remarkable the closer you look. Trump’s toxicity among women was supposed to be an insuperable obstacle; but the vote of women is now equally divided between the two front-runners, with each candidate supported by 46 percent of women. Hispanics were the key demographic whose growth was supposed to fuel the Democrats’ “inevitable demographic majority”; but, according to current polls, they favor Trump over Biden by 46 to 40 percent. Finally, African-Americans were long treated as a monolithic voting bloc, as over 90 percent reliably favored Democratic candidates; it now appears that nearly 1 in 4 black voters will support Trump in November.
The extent of the fluidity is even more profound than these figures suggest; after all, people within demographic blocs also frequently change their views in ways that contradict top-line trends. In keeping with the overall trend, I have numerous white, college-educated friends who moved from voting for Mitt Romney in 2012 to voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. I also, however, have two white, college-educated friends who reluctantly voted for Clinton and Biden, but are now determined to vote for Trump.
The recognition that American politics is highly fluid as well as deeply competitive has important implications for how to understand this political moment. Five are particularly striking.
1) Persuasion matters. Partisans and activists like to claim that elections in a deeply divided nation are a matter of turning out the base rather than swaying the undecided. This stance is all the more attractive to them because it implies that no trade-off exists between ideological purity and electoral viability: There is, it would appear, no need to moderate to broaden your appeal. But the reality is very different: Voters do change their minds. Over recent years, they have done so en masse.
2) The American electorate is racially depolarizing. Parts of the left have complacently assumed that the growth of the nonwhite population would give Democrats a natural advantage. Conversely, parts of the right have grown paranoid about an impending “replacement” of America’s white population, in part because they share the same empirical premise: They believe, as Trump advisor Michael Anton expressed the point in an influential 2016 essay, that a more diverse America would become “more Democratic, less Republican [and] less republican” with every electoral cycle. But demography turns out not to be destiny. This is a reason to celebrate: None of us should wish to live in a country in which I can reliably predict who you vote for by looking at the color of your skin.
3) Democrats made a mistake by turning themselves into the party of the college educated. A lot of Americans have a college degree. And, yes, their share of the population is growing. But for the foreseeable future, they will remain a clear minority. A party that keeps increasing its support among affluent and highly educated voters while rapidly bleeding support among the multiracial working class puts itself on a descending trajectory. Incidentally, it will also struggle mightily to realize longstanding goals of the left, such as redistributing money from the affluent (who have become the Democrats’ core constituency) to the disadvantaged (who increasingly view the Democratic Party with deep disdain). To become electorally dominant and ideologically cohesive, Democrats need to overcome their working-class problem.
4) Republicans are paying a high price for falling in line with the MAGA movement. After Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012, the then-chair of the RNC, Reince Priebus, argued that Republicans needed to moderate their stances on cultural issues and strike a bargain on immigration to appeal to nonwhite voters. Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party was widely seen as a repudiation of that strategy. Ironically and perhaps inadvertently, however, Trump ended up delivering on Priebus’ goals. With his help, the GOP has significantly increased its share of the nonwhite vote. In purely electoral terms, that is a remarkable achievement. But at the same time, Trump’s extremist rhetoric and his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election made many voters who used to support Republican candidates, from small-town professionals to moderate swing voters in the suburbs, flee the party. To capitalize fully on their big inroads with new demographics, Republicans need to keep broadening their working-class appeal; but they also need to stem their bleeding among instinctively conservative milieus that should in theory be well-disposed towards the party. In other words, a repudiation of Trump’s extremism and rule-breaking is not just a matter of decency and democratic stability; it is also favored by cold-blooded electoral calculus.
5) A transformative candidate could win a big victory. When a country’s politics is competitive and rigid, big victories are well-nigh impossible; for a candidate to break through the partisan divide, the longstanding political cleavages that define a country like Northern Ireland would first need to be swept aside. But when a country’s politics is competitive yet fluid, as is now the case in the United States, such a paradigm shift is much more feasible. A candidate simply needs to pitch a sufficiently broad tent—an ambitious feat, to be sure, but one that the most important political figures of the past have repeatedly proved capable of accomplishing.
2024 will not be a year of transformation. After Super Tuesday, it is painfully obvious that the election will (barring a last-minute health emergency) be a rerun of 2020. The illusion of a rigid divide between America’s blue and red tribes will stay with us for another four years; four years that, especially if Trump wins, as now seems likely, promise to be full of rancor and anger.
But if you gather the foresight to look around the next historical corner, it is not difficult to imagine what a transformative candidate might look like in 2028. For there is now a clear ideological center of gravity in American life, one that either a Democratic or a Republican candidate could capture if only they had the courage to try.
On the economy, most Americans remain deeply committed to capitalism and free enterprise; but they also want politicians to take on special interests, to ensure that big corporations pay their fair share of tax, and that people without a college degree can earn a decent livelihood. On culture, most Americans are much more tolerant and open-minded than they were a few decades ago; but a growing majority is sick both of the moralistic hectoring that has become the natural habitus of the country’s cultural elite and of the performative boorishness that dominates that MAGA movement.
A new majority is there for the taking. But because of the abject failure of America’s political leaders to understand this moment, it will, at least for the next four years, continue to lie fallow.
Yascha Mounk is the founder and editor-in-chief of Persuasion.
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I'm an elected democratic PCO of my voting precinct in Seattle. I'm a bipartisan wing democrat, not a progressive. I do vote across party lines when the other party's candidate matches my policy preferences best. This enrages party stalwarts, but I know that many voters in my precinct are not progressives as I review the precinct-level election results. I really encourage people to run for PCO in either party and represent your neighbors because this is an election year for PCOs and you need to register during filing week in your county. The election happens in the Primary, not the General. You'll take office in the New Year. It happens every even year. Across the country where once these PCO positions were competitively filled, they're now 80-85% vacant in both parties. This, in my opinion, is where the polarization comes from. I certainly witness it at my 36th LD Democrats meetings and endorsements. They'd vote communist if they could. Mark your calendar to run this year. Just check your County Elections Office for filing week and do it. There are very few moderate PCOs and we can really do something about that. I would bet that most journalists that write about polarization, don't even know that PCOs exist, so they've most likely never been one or perhaps haven't even attended a partisan meeting in their Legislative District to get a feel for the fringe people running the show in both parties. People call themselves Democrats and Republicans, but they don't look under the hood very often.
Once again, Yascha demonstrates that he understands America better than professional commentators. I thought that his interview with Edward Luce should have been titled “Thoughtful German Scholar Encounters Dogmatic and Predictable British Pundit.” The two foreign accents made it more amusing. This essay is the perfect follow up with “A new majority is there for the taking. But because of the abject failure of America’s political leaders to understand the moment, it will, at least for the next four years, continue to lie fallow.”
Make a list of five things that make up your identity. It probably doesn’t include political party. Every year we see articles telling us how to prepare for political fighting at holiday gatherings. Maybe that takes place
within the beltway, but ours includes births, deaths, marriages, trips, music, boating, books, movies, etc. The occasional political comment is quickly moved past. “Four more years” is not a chant of support any longer, but a whispered statement of despair.