Note: This post was originally on WFAE's The Party Line website until the site underwent a change and was deleted. I'm reposting it for folks who are interested as we get closer to the election (thanks to Rick Short who asked for a repost).
We read all the time about how “polarized” our nation is,
and we see it in the “red versus blue” categorization, the way that the U.S. Congress behaves,
even the animosity that seems to be driving the two parties at the local level
against each other.
Over sixty years ago, the American Political Science
Association released a report
that said that the two major parties needed to be more “responsible” in the
governing process. In fact, the report argued
that an active opposition is “most conducive to responsible government” and
that “when there are two parties identifiable by the kinds of action they
propose, the voters have an actual choice” (page 19).
So now we have parties that are truly different, and is it
any surprise that we have the polarization now?
But there has to be a starting point—a foundation—for where that
polarization begins.
Some scholars
of our nation’s politics believe that it starts from the top down—that the
elites within the parties have sorted themselves into ideologically coherent
divisions, and that the masses have followed right along with them.
But what about at the grassroots level? Can we see the impact of two very different
political parties at the local level?
In running some analysis on the recent redistricting of
Mecklenburg’s County Commission districts, I came across an interesting
analysis of the various precincts in the Great State of Meck: out of the
county’s 195 precincts, only thirteen could be considered “toss-up” precincts,
ones that could potentially go either Democratic or Republican when voting for
president.
For the vast majority—137 precincts in Mecklenburg—the
analysis showed that the one political party tended to dominant in those
precincts: 72 precincts were “likely Republican” in their presidential voting
patterns, while another 65 were “likely Democratic.”
The way that I arrived at this analysis was to take the past
two presidential elections in the precincts and look at the differences between
the two party’s votes, in comparison to the county average’s for both party’s
presidential candidates. So, in 2004,
John Kerry won Mecklenburg with 52% of the vote, while four years, Obama won
with 61% of the vote—there’s your baseline.
Then, I took each precinct and compared the performance of
the presidential candidates against the county baseline; for example, in
Precinct 56, Kerry won with 97% of the vote, and Obama captured 99% of the
vote.
Taking the differences between the precinct’s performance compared
to the county (45 and 38) and then
averaging the two years together, you come up with a Partisan Voting Index for
that precinct: for Precinct 56, it was 41% for the Democrats, or D+41.
Using a classification of anything over +10 on either side
as “likely” to vote for that party, those between +3 and +10 as “lean” and anything
below +3 as “toss-up” precincts, you can assign each precinct into one of these
categories to see the voting behavior of Mecklenburg County by its various
precincts:
What stands out to me is the sheer number of “likely”
precincts that are either heavily Democratic or heavily Republican, based on
presidential voting patterns. With so
very few “toss-up” precincts, Mecklenburg voters seem to have sorted themselves
into politically segregated areas.
So what does this tell us?
Several years ago, Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing wrote “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of
Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.” They argue that, even though the nation
is becoming more diverse, where Americans live is becoming more homogenous:
that we live in areas where our neighbors think, live, and vote like we
do.
By looking at this phenomenon from the ground up, Bishop contends
that Americans have “sorted” themselves into like-minded communities, and that
by doing so, we have found ourselves in our current polarized state: “mixed
company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities
restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes”
(page 68).
As North Carolinians head into the primary electoral season
on May 8th, it would be worth remembering that when we have
conversations with folks of the opposite party, ending with people shaking their
heads and saying “why don’t those folks just understand where I’m coming from,”
it could be because they don’t live in a like-minded precinct as we do.
And therefore, voters have no reason to understand where the
other side is coming from—and that we are shocked when we complain that our
politics is so polarized.
