Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

In 2004, the Republican candidate for president won 55 percent of men. In 2008, he won 48 percent of men. In 2012, 52 percent. And in 2016? Trump won 52 percent of men, precisely matching Romney’s performance.

In 2004, the Republican won 48 percent of female voters. In 2008, he won 43 percent; in 2012, 44 percent. And in 2016? 41 percent.

in 2004, the GOP candidate won 58 percent of white voters. In 2008, he won 55 percent of white voters. In 2012, he won 59 percent of white voters. Fast-forward to 2016: 57 percent.

In 2004, the Republican candidate won 44 percent of Hispanic voters. In 2008, he won 31 percent. In 2012, 27 percent. And in 2016, 28 percent.

After the GOP’s 2004 victory, the Republican Party’s dominance was widely ascribed to Bush’s deep, authentic bond with white, born-again Christians, of whom 78 percent pulled the lever for his reelection. In 2008, the GOP candidate won 74 percent of these voters. In 2012, it was back up to 78 percent. But Trump was different. He was a morally louche adulterer who flaunted his wealth, and when asked, on the campaign trail, if he ever turned to God for forgiveness, he said, “I am not sure I have.” So how did he do among white, born-again voters? He won 80 percent.

Parenthood. In 2004, the Republican candidate won 93 percent of self-identified Republicans. In 2008, he won 90 percent. In 2012, he won 93 percent. In 2016, he won 88 percent.

In 2008, the Democrat won by more than 9 million votes. In 2012, the Democrat won by almost 5 million votes. And in 2016, the Democrat again won by almost 3 million votes.

toxic systems compromise good individuals with ease. They do so not by demanding we betray our values but by enlisting our values such that we betray each other. What is rational and even moral for us to do individually becomes destructive when done collectively.

When a division exists inside a party, it gets addressed through suppression or compromise. Parties don’t want to fight among themselves. But when a division exists between the parties, it gets addressed through conflict. Without the restraint of party unity, political disagreements escalate.

we became more consistent in the party we vote for not because we came to like our party more—indeed, we’ve come to like the parties we vote for less—but because we came to dislike the opposing party more. Even as hope and change sputter, fear and loathing proceed.

What has happened to American politics in recent decades is that the parties have become visibly, undeniably more different, and the country has rationally become more partisan in response.

“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.”18

During his 1946 reelection campaign, Democratic senator Theodore Bilbo was chillingly blunt: “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting. You do it the night before the election. I don’t have to tell you any more than that. Red-blooded men know what I mean.”5 He won the race.

Of the many factors that make up your worldview, one is more fundamental than any other in determining which side of the divide you gravitate toward: your perception of how dangerous the world is. Fear is perhaps our most primal instinct, after all, so it’s only logical that people’s level of fearfulness informs their outlook on life.32 Different studies categorize people in different ways, but the common thread is that openness to experience—and the basic optimism that drives it—is associated with liberalism, while conscientiousness, a preference for order and tradition that breeds a skepticism toward disruptive change, connects to conservatism.

Our brains reflect deep evolutionary time, while our lives, for better and for worse, are lived right now, in this moment. We are exquisitely tuned to understand and manage our role in the small, necessary groups that defined our world as hunter-gatherers, but we’ve not had long to adjust to the digitized, globalized, accelerated world we’ve built. The sensitivities that helped us thrive within the interplay of a few groups of a few hundred people can drive us mad when exposed to the scale, noise, and sophisticated manipulations of modern capitalism and politics. Our brains don’t always know the difference between the life-and-death stakes that group fortunes once held and the milder consequences they typically carry today.

Of every politician I have covered, of every politician I have met, Obama is the most thoughtful and reflective, the best at seeing American politics with historical perspective and analytical altitude.

In December 2009, every single Senate Republican voted for a point of order calling the individual mandate “unconstitutional.” Among them were Senators Bob Bennett, Lamar Alexander, Bob Corker, Mike Crapo, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Grassley, and Judd Gregg—all of whom were cosponsors of the Healthy Americans Act, which, again, included an individual mandate.

“The central flaw in the concept of reason that animated the eighteenth-century Enlightenment is that it is entirely individualistic,” writes philosopher Joseph Heath.12 But decades of research has proven that “reason is both decentralized and dispersed across multiple individuals. It is not possible to be rational all by yourself; rationality is inherently a collective project.”I

being better at math made partisans less likely to solve the problem correctly when solving the problem correctly meant betraying their political instincts. People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right.

Imagine what would happen to, say, Sean Hannity if he decided tomorrow that climate change was the central threat facing the planet. Initially, his viewers would think he was joking. But soon, they’d begin calling in furiously. Some would organize a boycott of his program. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of professional climate skeptics would begin angrily refuting Hannity’s new crusade. Many of Hannity’s friends in the conservative media world would back away from him, and some would seek advantage by denouncing him. Politicians he respects would be furious at his betrayal of the cause. He would lose friendships, viewers, and money. He could ultimately lose his job. And along the way he would cause himself immense personal pain as he systematically alienated his closest political and professional allies. The world would have to update its understanding of who Sean Hannity is and what he believes, and so, too, would Sean Hannity. Changing your identity is a psychologically and socially brutal process.

“once group loyalties are engaged, you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence.”29 Psychologists have a term for this: “motivated reasoning.”

This is the core cleavage of our politics, and it reflects a defining trend of our era: America is changing, and fast. According to the Census Bureau, 2013 marked the first year that a majority of US infants under the age of one were nonwhite.

America’s black, Hispanic, Asian, and mixed-race populations are expected to grow—indeed, the Hispanic and Asian populations are expected to roughly double by 2060 and the mixed-race population to triple. Meanwhile, the non-Hispanic white population is, uniquely, expected to fall, dipping from 199 million in 2020 to 179 million in 2060. The Census Bureau minces no words here: “The only group projected to shrink is the non-Hispanic White population.”

“An identity is questioned only when it is menaced,” wrote James Baldwin, “as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger: the stranger’s presence making you the stranger, less to the stranger than to yourself.”11

even gentle, incidental exposure to reminders that America is diversifying—and particularly to the idea that America is becoming a majority-minority nation—pushes whites toward more conservative policy opinions and more support of the Republican Party.

Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant. Every group feels attacked, pitted against other groups not just for jobs and spoils but for the right to define the nation’s identity. In these conditions, democracy devolves into zero-sum group competition—pure political tribalism.

Before Obama’s presidency, how Americans felt about black people did not much affect their perceptions of the economy. After Obama, this changed. In December 2007, racial resentment—which captures whether Americans think deficiencies in black culture are the main reason for racial inequality—was not related to whites’ perceptions of whether the economy was getting better or worse, after accounting for partisanship and ideology. But when these exact same people were re-interviewed in July 2012, racial resentment was a powerful predictor of economic perceptions: the greater someone’s level of racial resentment, the worse they believed the economy was doing.27

“Anyone who wants to explain what’s happening in the West needs to answer two simple questions,” writes the political scientist Eric Kaufmann in his book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. “First, why are right-wing populists doing better than left-wing ones? Second, why did the migration crisis boost populist-right numbers sharply while the economic crisis had no overall effect? If we stick to data, the answer is crystal clear. Demography and culture, not economic and political developments, hold the key to understanding the populist moment.”

they increasingly need it to appeal to their white base, too. In 1994, 39 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Republicans said discrimination was the main reason “black people can’t get ahead these days.” By 2017, 64 percent of Democrats believed that, but only 14 percent of Republicans.

The world is not zero-sum, but it is sometimes zero-sum. A world in which 50 percent of government appointees are female is a world in which fewer are male. Those losses will be felt and fought. Powerful social movements will arise to protect what is being taken, to justify the way things were before. Society often appears calm when fundamental injustices go unchallenged, but even if that were desirable—and it’s not—it will be impossible as historically marginalized groups gain the power to demand their share of the American dream.

Democrat now means liberal and Republican now means conservative in a way that wasn’t true in, say, 1955. The rise in partisanship is, in part, a rational response to the rise in party difference—if the two sides hated and feared each other less fifty years ago, well, that makes sense; they were more similar fifty years ago.

The old line on local reporting was: “If it bleeds, it leads.” For political reporting, the principle is: “If it outrages, it leads.”

Having a mutual enemy is a quick way to make a friend—we learn this as early as elementary school—and politically, it’s much easier to organize people against something than it is to unite them in an affirmative vision. And, within the economy of attention, conflict always gets more people to look.8

In Identity Crisis, Sides, Vavreck, and Tesler find that “from May 1, 2015, to April 30, 2016, Trump’s median share of cable news mentions was 52 percent.” There were seventeen Republican candidates running for president, so Trump was getting more than half of all the media coverage, with the other sixteen candidates splitting the remainder.15 It gets worse. “Trump received 78 percent of all coverage on CNN between Aug. 24 and Sept. 4, 2015,” and by November 2015, “Trump had received more evening network news coverage—234 minutes—than the entire Democratic field. By contrast, Ted Cruz had received seven minutes.”16 This was a choice the media made, and it is not one, in retrospect, that I think many would defend. In February of 2016, for instance, the chairman of CBS said of Donald Trump’s candidacy, and the ratings it drew, “it may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. . . . It’s a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” I suspect he would not make the same comments today.

What Dowd found was that the share of true independents—the number of people who were actually undecided and could vote for either party—had plummeted in recent elections, going from, in his calculations, about 22 percent of the electorate to 7 percent. The implications of this were “fairly revolutionary, because everybody up until that time had said, ‘Swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters.’ ”

Fifty years ago, Republican Party elites would’ve stopped Trump long before the choice collapsed into the binary of him or Clinton. Up until the 1970s, party nominations were controlled by party officials. The only way to win a presidential nomination was to win the delegates at the national convention. That meant convincing party bosses who cared more for their own power than ideology and who prioritized, above all, being able to work with whoever took office. The horse-trading to win a nomination could be intense, particularly when no candidate entered with a commanding majority of delegates: in 1924, Democratic delegates went through more than a hundred ballots before nominating John W. Davis. It’s from brokered conventions like these that we get the modern metaphor of smoke-filled back rooms. Both parties have since turned their presidential nomination processes over to party primaries, which means that the measure of a candidate isn’t whether he or she can win over party bosses but whether he or she can win over the intense minority of party supporters who turn out to vote in primaries (in 2016, for instance, less than 30 percent of eligible voters participated in primaries—and that was unusually high). This has made parties weaker, partisans stronger, and the American political system more vulnerable to demagogues.

The quirks of quantum physics dominate the very small and the rules of special relativity describe the very large. So, too, with money in politics. In my experience, transactional giving drives the bills no one has heard of, the provisions few people read, the regulatory processes the public and the media tend to ignore. But at the macro level—the level of presidential politics and legislative fights that lead front pages day after day—it’s partisan dollars that dominate outcomes. If the business community could purchase its preferences in all things, immigration reform and infrastructure investment would’ve passed long ago and Jeb Bush would be president.

In an era of high polarization, weak parties, and strong partisanship, it’s easy to see how extremists and, more than that, demagogues penetrate the system. America was lucky, if that’s the right word, that Trump proved himself, once in office, distractible, lazy, and uninterested in following through on his most authoritarian rhetoric. He’s done plenty of damage, but he’s not emerged as a dictator in control of American political institutions, as many liberals feared in the direct aftermath of the election. But the world also produces clever, disciplined demagogues. They are the ones who truly threaten republics, and they are watching.

In 2012, the two scholars published It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, and in it, they minced no words: Today’s Republican Party … is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government’s role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for “balance,” constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.

Trump wasn’t a break with this Republican Party. He was the most authentic expression of its modern psychology.

The percentage of Americans calling themselves conservative has long dwarfed the percentage who identify as liberal. In 1994, conservatives outnumbered liberals 38–17. That gap has closed in recent years, but as of January 2019, conservatives still lead, 35–26.

Dave Roberts calls this “tribal epistemology”—when “information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders.”14

America is not a democracy. Our political system is built around geographic units, all of which privilege sparse, rural areas over dense, urban ones. This is most glaringly true in the Senate, where Vermont wields the same power as New York. But it is also true in the House, due to the way districts are drawn, and in the White House, due to the electoral college, and thus it is also true in the Supreme Court, which reflects the outcomes of presidential and senatorial elections. And power, of course, begets power.

Trump rode to victory. The alternative to democratizing America is scarier than mere polarization: it’s a legitimacy crisis that could threaten the very foundation of our political system. By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in the fifteen largest states. That means 70 percent of America will be represented by only thirty senators, while the other 30 percent of America will be represented by seventy senators.1 It is not difficult to imagine an America where Republicans consistently win the presidency despite rarely winning the popular vote, where they typically control both the House and the Senate despite rarely winning more votes than the Democrats, where their dominance of the Supreme Court is unquestioned, and where all this power is used to buttress a system of partisan gerrymandering, pro-corporate campaign finance laws, strict voter ID requirements, and anti-union legislation that further weakens Democrats’ electoral performance. That would not, in the long term, prove a stable system.

In 2016, Trump won because of 40,000 voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. In 2020, he lost because of 22,000 voters in Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona—if those votes had flipped, the electoral college would’ve been tied, and the election would’ve been decided by state congressional delegations, which Republicans control.

A party that keeps losing voters has two choices. It can change itself—its agenda, its standard-bearers, its temperament—to win over new voters. Or it can turn against democracy, using the power it still holds to disenfranchise or weaken the voters who threaten it. The Republican Party, for now, has chosen the second path and chosen it decisively.