Is the Red/Blue Divide Real?

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 2.4

Periods of government gridlock and partisan bickering have long been regular components of American politics. Today it is common for political pundits to describe the United States as increasingly polarized. The “red state/blue state” metaphor has become nearly universal among commentators. Indeed, it is true that most politicians and political partisans have sorted themselves via the Internet and choice of media news sources into camps of like-minded adherents. They hear and see a constant stream of corroborating information that reinforces their existing biases and world views. 

Partisanship has shifted in recent decades, primarily in terms of negative attitudes towards the other party, more than support for one’s preferred party. Even before the rise of the Trump phenomenon, political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster observed in a 2015 essay entitled “The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is the Other Party” that

“The rise of negative partisanship in the American electorate appears to be part of a vicious cycle of mutually reinforcing elite and mass behavior. Confrontational politics in Washington and in many state capitols is causing Democratic and Republican voters to develop increasingly negative views of the opposing party and to vote along party lines from the top of the ticket to the bottom. Negative views of the opposing party among voters, in turn, encourage political elites to adopt a confrontational approach to governing. Given these mutually reinforcing patterns of elite and mass behavior, negative partisanship is likely to remain an important feature of American politics for the foreseeable future.”

Since 2016 and into the following decade, the trend these researchers noted has only gotten more extreme.

While a divergence of partisan candidate and media preferences is real, the sharp political divide of the red state/blue state shorthand is far too simplistic. The extreme polarization has been confirmed among elected officials of different parties by stringent scientific analysis of congressional voting behavior. There appears to be a reinforcing feedback loop between elected officials and partisan activists who make up a relatively small segment of the general public, but can be decisive in party primaries in which even fewer voters participate. As Josh Pacewicz, a professor of sociology and urban studies at Brown University, observed in a 2016 interview: “That American politics has been polarized more by changes among party activists than changes among voters is fairly well established in political science.”   

Two researchers at Stanford and Princeton, Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, showed through various experiments that members of the public who identify with either the Democratic or Republican Party sort themselves into distinct social groups. This in-group/out-group identification is independent of policy preferences. Partisans are inclined on both a conscious and unconscious level to discriminate against people seen to be part of the opposing party, even on purely non-political matters. Though driven by candidate campaigns and hyper-partisan activists, this polarization seeps out into the wider public. In a 2014 article published in the American Journal of Political Science the researchers wrote:

“The mass public may offer centrist preferences, but they certainly sense that ‘the other side’ is an out-group. While Americans are inclined to ‘hedge’ expressions of overt animosity toward racial minorities, immigrants, gays, or other marginalized groups, they enthusiastically voice hostility for the out-party and its supporters.”

Stunningly, their rigorous psychology experiments showed that “the level of partisan animus in the American public exceeds racial hostility.” They analyze this finding by stating:

“Unlike race, gender and other social divides where group-related attitudes and behaviors are constrained by social norms …, there are no corresponding pressures to temper disapproval of political opponents. If anything, the rhetoric and actions of political leaders demonstrate that hostility directed at the opposition is acceptable, even appropriate. Partisans therefore feel free to express animus and engage in discriminatory behavior toward opposing partisans.”

The elections during the 2020s that occurred after that particular study was done have only increased the social acceptability of personal attacks on Democrats by Republicans and on Republicans by Democrats. To some extent this is a “chicken or egg” question — does partisan animosity among citizens simply reflect fundamentally different world views, values, or psychology, which prompts politicians to respond in kind, or do the campaign strategies and attack ads of candidates and associated pundits generate such animosity? In a reinforcing feedback loop, candidates encourage citizens to be suspicious of the motives and even morals of candidates and supporters of the other party, and then cater to that suspicion to win votes in their party primaries. 

But this red/blue polarization exaggerates divisions within the general population as far as policy is concerned, except for a handful of signature issues that serve to define in-group membership. Even purveyors of this color analogy readily admit the obvious fact that all states have a combination of “red” and “blue,” conservative and liberal leaning citizens, and no state is 100 percent red or blue. This self-evident observation only scratches the surface of the simplification in the red/blue state description. In 2011, researchers Jeremy Pope and Matt Levendusky conducted a study that looked at what polarization actually exists among residents of red and blue states. Using Utah as the archetypal red state and New York as the blue, they found that 77 percent of voters in the two states generally agree on social policy and 69 percent have common ground on economic issues. Indeed, any one voter from Utah has a 46 percent chance of scoring more liberal than a random voter selected from New York on economic issues and a 51 percent chance of being more liberal on social issues. So if the voters in red states and blue states are generally pretty similar, why are their elected officials so polarized? The researchers suggest “this points to the key role played by electoral institutions,” such as primaries and winner-take-all plurality election rules. The election process magnifies slight differences in public preferences into extreme electoral outcomes. 

Our representative bodies at the local, state, and national level simply aren’t very representative of the population. The Rasmussen Reports polling firm found in 2010 that “76 percent of voters generally trust the American people more than political leaders on important national issues.” While responses to such survey questions fluctuate from year to year, Rasmussen Reports concludes that over time, 65 percent of Americans “tend to trust the wisdom of the crowd more than their political leaders and are skeptical of both big government and big business.” What’s more, “a majority of Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated voters share those views.” The other end of the spectrum of opinion – those who support the “political class” –  according to Rasmussen, make up a mere 4 percent of the population. The rest are somewhere in between these extremes. In 2023, the Rasmussen survey on the same question found 70 percent still held this view, despite Donald Trump’s oft-repeated exhortation to his followers that “only I can fix it.”

This provides a tantalizing hint that the standard right/left, Republican/Democrat, red/blue spectrum that the political parties and the media focus on, may mask another more significant axis of concern about a democracy deficit and elite power. Whether they are a conservative, moderate, liberal, progressive, or have no affiliation at all, most Americans look at Congress and recognize that something is fundamentally wrong with how our supposed democracy is working.