Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

Identity, of course, is nothing new. So how can it explain the changes in our politics? The answer is that our political identities are changing—and strengthening. The most powerful identities in modern politics are our political identities, which have come, in recent decades, to encompass and amplify a range of other central identities as well. Over the past fifty years, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. Those merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking our institutions and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.

Political parties are shortcuts. The APSA report called them “indispensable instruments of government,” because they “provide the electorate with a proper range of choice between alternatives of action.”

In a striking analysis entitled “All Politics Is National,” Emory University political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster show how that behavior collapsed in the latter half of the twentieth century and virtually disappeared across the millennium’s dividing line. Looking at districts with contested House races, they found that between 1972 and 1980, the correlation between the Democratic share of the House vote and the Democratic share of the presidential vote was .54. Between 1982 and 1990, that rose to .65. By 2018, it had reached .97!11 In forty years, support for the Democratic presidential candidate went from being a helpful, but far from reliable, predictor of support for a party’s House candidate to being an almost perfect guide.

in 1994, 32 percent of Democrats and 30 percent of Republicans agreed that immigrants strengthened the country. By 2017, that had jumped to 84 percent of Democrats but only 42 percent of Republicans. In 1994, 63 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats agreed that poor people had it easy because they could get government help without doing anything in return. By 2017, the number of Republicans who agreed with that statement had risen slightly, to 65 percent, but the number of Democrats who agreed with it had tumbled to 18 percent. “The bottom line is this,” concludes the report: “Across 10 measures that Pew Research Center has tracked on the same surveys since 1994, the average partisan gap has increased from 15 percentage points to 36 points.”

The question isn’t why voters have become more reliably partisan as the parties have become more obviously different. Of course they did. It’s why the parties have become so different. That’s a story, as so many are in American life, that revolves around race.