Peak Polarization

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.

 Alan J. Abramowitz, "Peak Polarization? The Rise of Partisan-Ideological Consistency and its Consequences."  Prepared for delivery at the State of the Parties Conference, Ray Bliss Institute, University of Akron, November 4-5, 2021

 This paper presents evidence from American National Election Studies surveys showing that party identification, ideological identification and issue positions have become much more closely connected over the past half century. As a result, the ideological divide between Democratic and Republican identifiers has widened considerably. Using the extensive battery of issue questions included in the 2020 ANES survey, I find that a single underlying liberalconservative dimension largely explains the policy preferences of ordinary Americans across a wide range of issues including the size and scope of the welfare state, abortion, gay and transgender rights, race relations, immigration, gun control and climate change. I find that the distribution of preferences on this liberal-conservative issue scale is highly polarized with Democratic identifiers and leaners located overwhelmingly on the left, Republican identifiers and leaners located overwhelmingly on the right and little overlap between the two distributions. Finally, I show that the rise of partisan-ideological consistency has had profound consequences for public opinion and voting behavior, contributing to growing affective polarization as well as increasing party loyalty and straight ticket voting. These findings indicate that polarization in the American public has a rational foundation. Hostility toward the opposing party reflects strong disagreement with the policies of the opposing party. As long as the parties remain on the opposite sides of almost all major issues, feelings of mistrust and animosity are unlikely to diminish regardless of Donald Trump’s future role in the Republican Party. 

Critical Race Theory

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.

PRRI:

One-third of Americans (34%) say they have heard nothing at all about critical race theory, 44% say they have heard a little, and only 19% say they have heard a lot. There are no significant differences among partisans, but Republicans who most trust far-right news outlets (37%) and Fox News (30%) are more likely than Republicans overall (20%) to say they have heard a lot about critical race theory. About one in three Americans or less across all demographic groups say they have heard a lot about critical race theory.

Despite some high-profile flare-ups over this issue in the media, there is a broad consensus about what history should be taught in schools. When asked what children should be taught in schools, the vast majority of Americans (84%) agree that “We should teach American history that includes both our best achievements and our worst mistakes as a country,” compared to only 13% who say “We should teach American history that focuses on what makes this country exceptional and great.”

Vast majorities of all demographic groups say that we should teach American history that includes both our best achievements and our worst mistakes as a country, including Republicans (80%), independents (86%), and Democrats (90%).

 

This guy says Critical Race Theory is the most important issue in the Virginia Election. He also says he has no idea what Critical Race Theory is. pic.twitter.com/lBrGy4lRBG

— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) November 1, 2021

Cluster Analysis

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.

 Heather Caygle and colleagues at Politico:

House Democrats on Friday broke a monthslong fever that has imperiled their entire domestic agenda, thanks to a truce from moderates and liberals brokered to advance more than $2 trillion in party priorities.

The truce bore fruit late, as the House cleared a $550 billion infrastructure bill for President Joe Biden's signature just before midnight and moved ahead on Democrats' $1.75 trillion social spending package. Those two milestones capped off a frantic and nearly disastrous day for the party, ending what has proved to be Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s most grueling exercise yet so far this Congress with just three votes to lose.

“The whole day was a cluster----, right?” said senior progressive Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), who helped negotiate the rapprochement with the moderates. “At the end of the day what we all want to do is get the president’s agenda done, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Post-Mortems

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state elections.  The 2021 off-year races are a curtain-raiser for the midterms.

Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns at NYT:

Although they had braced for a close race for Virginia governor, Democrats were caught off guard by the intensity of the backlash against their party in major off-year elections. Republicans claimed all three statewide offices in Virginia, will likely take control of the state’s House of Delegates and came close to upsetting Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, whose re-election had been presumed safe by officials in both parties.

Just as jarring for Democrats were some of the less prominent contests: The powerful New Jersey State Senate president, Steve Sweeney, was trailing a truck driver who ran a shoestring campaign; a Latino Republican flipped a Democratic seat in South San Antonio; and Democrats were thrashed in local races across Long Island.

...

“We were so willing to take seriously a global pandemic, but we’re not willing to say, ‘Yeah, inflation is a problem, and supply chain is a problem, and we don’t have enough workers in our work force,’” said Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat facing a bruising re-election. “We gloss over that and only like to admit to problems in spaces we dominate.”

More pointedly, Ms. Spanberger said Mr. Biden must not forget that, for many voters, his mandate was quite limited: to remove former President Donald J. Trump from their television screens and to make American life ordinary again.

“Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos,” she said, alluding to the sweeping agenda the president is seeking to enact with the thinnest of legislative majorities.

Ally Mutnick and Elena Schneider at Politico:

“This is 2009 all over again,” said former Rep. Steve Israel, the New York Democrat who led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee right after the disastrous 2010 election, when Democrats lost more than 60 House seats. “The only benefit they have now over 2009 is knowing just how bad it can get.”

Democrats’ House majority — and their path to the White House in 2020 — was built in large part on suburban, college-educated voters who spurned former President Donald Trump. But Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin’s inroads with them — carving deep into the northern Virginia counties where Democratic dominance in the last governor’s race foretold the 2018 “blue wave” — proves Democrats’ support in those suburbs is soft. That's especially true as Biden and congressional Democrats struggle to clinch a deal on their social spending packages and Republicans double down on culture war campaigns.

Alayna Treene at Axios:

The entire Republican ecosystem has been hitting the same five issues since the start of 2021.

1. Inflation/the rising cost of living.
2. Immigration/border security.
3. Crime/calls to defund the police.
4. President Biden's handling of Afghanistan.
5. Teachers' unions/ school mask mandates.

 

Bad Night For Democrats

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state elections.  The 2021 off-year races are a curtain-raiser for the midterms.

Lisa Lerer at NYT: 

The menacing thunder couldn’t get much louder for Democrats.

Few in the party had high hopes that their era of rule in Washington would last beyond the midterm elections next year. But the Republican resurgence on Tuesday in Virginia — a state that President Biden won by 10 percentage points last year — and surprising strength in solidly blue New Jersey offer a vivid warning of the storm clouds gathering as Democrats look warily to the horizon.

For five years, the party rode record-breaking turnouts to victory, fueled by voters with a passion for ousting a president they viewed as incompetent, divisive or worse. Tuesday’s results showed the limitations of such resistance politics when the object of resistance is out of power, the failure of Democrats to fulfill many of their biggest campaign promises, and the still-simmering rage over a pandemic that transformed schools into some of the country’s most divisive political battlegrounds.

In Virginia, the Democratic nominee for governor, Terry McAuliffe, was beaten with relative ease by Glenn Youngkin, a Republican private equity executive and political newcomer.

In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, faced a stunningly close race after being expected to coast to victory. In Minneapolis, voters rejected a ballot measure pushed by progressives that would have replaced the Police Department with a public safety department.

Perhaps most strikingly, the crushing setbacks for Democrats in heavily suburban Virginia and New Jersey hinted at a conservative-stoked backlash to the changing mores around race and identity championed by the party, as Republicans relentlessly sought to turn schools into the next front in the country’s culture wars.

For Democrats, the results on the nation’s single biggest day of voting until the midterms next year raised alarms that the wave of anti-Trump energy that carried them into power has curdled into apathy in a base that is tired of protesting and is largely back at brunch. Or, in what would be even more politically perilous, that the party’s motivation has been replaced by a sense of dissatisfaction with the state of a country that has, despite all of Mr. Biden’s campaign promises, not yet returned to a pre-Covid sense of normalcy.

Resorting to Violence

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.  Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.  

From the Public Religion Research Institute:

After the violent attacks on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the prospect of political violence threatening a peaceful transfer of power has become more than an abstract question. As noted above, nearly one in five Americans (18%) agree with the statement “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Republicans (30%) are more likely to agree with this than independents (17%) and Democrats (11%). Among Republicans who most trust far-right news sources, agreement increases to 40%, compared to 32% among those who most trust Fox News and 22% among those who most trust mainstream news sources.

White evangelical Protestants (26%) are the religious group most likely to agree that true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country, while 23% of those who follow non-Christian religions, 22% of Hispanic Catholics, 19% of white Catholics, 19% of other Christians, 17% of white mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants, 16% of Black Protestants, and 13% of religiously unaffiliated Americans agree.

The belief that violence could be an option is stronger among those who support former President Donald Trump and view changing culture as a threat. Among those who think the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, 39% agree that true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country, compared to only 10% among those who do not think the election was stolen.

Those who agree that things have changed so much they feel like strangers in their own country (29%) are more likely than those who disagree (12%) to agree that violence might be necessary, and those who think American culture has mostly changed for the worse since the 1950s (23%) are more likely than those who think it has changed for the better (14%) to say so.

Christian nationalist sympathies matter, as well: Among those who believe God has granted America a special role in human history, 27% agree that violence might be necessary, compared to 12% among those who do not think God granted America a special role.

"I have the support of the police"

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.  Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.  

 "I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad."  -- Donald Trump, Breitbart interview, 3/13/19

Kate McGee reports at The Texas Tribune:

As supporters of then-President Donald Trump surrounded and harassed a Joe Biden campaign bus on a Central Texas highway last year, San Marcos police officials and 911 dispatchers fielded multiple requests for assistance from Democratic campaigners and bus passengers who said they feared for their safety from a pack of motorists, known as a “Trump Train,” allegedly driving in dangerously aggressive ways.

“San Marcos refused to help,” an amended federal lawsuit over the 2020 freeway skirmish claims.

Transcribed 911 audio recordings and documents that reveal behind-the-scenes communications among law enforcement and dispatchers were included in the amended lawsuit, filed late Friday.

The transcribed recordings were filed in an attempt to show that San Marcos law enforcement leaders chose not to provide the bus with a police escort multiple times, even though police departments in other nearby cities did. In one transcribed recording, Matthew Daenzer, a San Marcos police corporal on duty the day of the incident, refused to provide an escort when recommended by another jurisdiction.

“No, we’re not going to do it,” Daenzer told a 911 dispatcher, according to the amended filing. “We will ‘close patrol’ that, but we’re not going to escort a bus.”

The amended filing also states that in those audio recordings, law enforcement officers “privately laughed” and “joked about the victims and their distress.”