Why We're Polarized Quotes

“It was a strategy to mobilize an alienated minority of the Republican base in order to prevail in a crowded, fractured field, and though it worked in the primary, everyone knew, or thought they knew, that a party divided against itself could not win a general election. Punditry was thick with predictions of a Republican wipeout, followed by an intraparty civil war.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“what to cover—decide, that is, what is newsworthy.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“polarized media doesn’t emphasize commonalities, it weaponizes differences;”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“If it bleeds, it leads.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The South was in the Democratic Party, but it didn’t agree with the Democratic Party—particularly once liberalism’s vision of redistribution and uplift expanded to include African Americans. So southern Democrats had ideological reasons to compromise with Republicans but political reasons to compromise with national Democrats. Southern power kept the Democratic Party less liberal than it otherwise would’ve been, the Republican Party congressionally weaker than it otherwise would’ve been, and stopped the two parties from sorting themselves around the deepest political cleavage of the age.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“As we become more political, we become more interested in politics as a means of self-expression and group identity.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The Varieties of Democracy Project,”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The Man Who Knew Too Little,”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“(popular elections came to the US Senate only with the 1913 ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment),”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The underlying principle in all this is that the two parties both represent huge swaths of Americans, and the fact that one has the majority does not mean the other should be deprived of a voice.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Ticket-splitting requires a baseline comfort with both political parties. Behind its demise is the evaporation of that comfort.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“That is a profound finding: when awarding a college scholarship—a task that should be completely nonpolitical
—Republicans and Democrats cared more about the political party of the student than the student’s GPA. As
Iyengar and Westwood wrote, “Partisanship simply trumped academic excellence.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Then there are the parts of my personality that seem like preferences but can act like identities when challenged.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Still, Iyengar and Westwood’s research is a fundamental challenge to the way we like to believe American politics works. A world where we won’t give an out-party high schooler with a better GPA a nonpolitical scholarship is not a world in which we’re going to listen to politicians on the other side of emotional, controversial issues—even if they’re making good arguments that are backed by the facts.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Partisans are the ones George Washington warned us of in his farewell address. They: put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The answer, they say, is that the parties we perceive are quite different from the parties that exist. To test the theory, they conducted a survey asking people “to estimate the percentage of Democrats who are black, atheist, or agnostic, union members, and gay, lesbian or bisexual and the percentage of Republicans who are evangelical, 65 or older, Southern, and earn over $250,000 per year.” They were asking, in other words, how much people thought the composition of the parties fit the caricatures of the parties.

Misperceptions were high among everyone, but they were particularly exaggerated when people were asked to describe the other party. Democrats believed 44 percent of Republicans earned over $250,000 a year; it’s actually 2 percent. Republicans believe that 38 percent of Democrats were gay, lesbian or bisexual; the correct answer is about 6 percent. Democrats believe that more than 4 out of every ten Republicans are seniors; in truth, seniors make up about 20 percent of the GOP. Republicans believed that 46 percent of Democrats are black and 44 percent belong to a union; in reality, about 24 percent of Democrats are African American and less than 11 percent belong to a union.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Ticket-splitting requires a baseline comfort with both political parties. Behind its demise is the evaporation of that comfort. Amid the battery of questions that surveyors ask Americans in every election lurks something called the “feeling thermometer.” The thermometer asks people to rate their feelings toward the two political parties on a scale of 1 to 100 degrees, where 1 is cold and negative and 100 is warm and positive. Since the 1980s, Republicans’ feelings toward the Democratic Party and Democrats’ feelings toward the Republican Party have dropped off a cliff.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Today, vegans are dismissed as extremists. I hope that in the future, the suffering that we impose on animals through industrial-scale factory farming is considered the shocking position.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though sometime back they may have entered illegally,”19 Reagan said.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized