This morning the invaluable RealClearPolitics links to two articles on opposite sides of the divide over whether there is a Red vs. Blue divide.
In the Washington Post, Dan Balz finds “For Democrats, A Troubling Culture Gap.” According to focus groups of rural voters and disaffected Bush voters by Democratic pollsters Stan Greenberg and Karl Agne,
All the groups expressed dissatisfaction with the direction of the country and with the leadership of the president and the GOP-controlled Congress.
Then came the bad news: “As powerful as the concern over these issues is, the introduction of cultural themes — specifically gay marriage, abortion, the importance of the traditional family unit and the role of religion in public life — quickly renders them almost irrelevant in terms of electoral politics at the national level,” the study said.
On the other side of the divide divide, liberal Robert Kuttner, ever hopeful, argues in the Boston Globe, “Red vs. Blue? Not True.” Rejecting “the image of an America split into hardened and warring camps,” Kuttner writes:
The reality is quite different. In the very close 2004 election, for instance, the contest was decided by 10 points or less in 21 states. And a surprising number of states voted one way for president, the other for senator or governor.
Montana, which Bush won by better than 20 points, elected a Democratic governor and gave Democrats control of both houses of the Legislature. Wyoming, which gave Kerry just 29 percent, has a Democratic governor, too. Likewise ”red state” Arizona and Oklahoma. Even Kansas, the poster child for working people who supposedly don’t vote their pocketbook interests, has a Democratic governor, too. Maybe there’s nothing the matter with Kansas.
Leave aside the obvious point that a “contest decided by 10 points” is a virtual landslide, Kuttner makes the fundamental error — an error in part share by Balz as well — of equating Red vs. Blue with Republican vs. Democrat. There is, of course, an overlap — indeed, a significant overlap — but, fortunately for the Democrats (and for some Republicans in Blue states), the partisan divide is not identical to the cultural divide.
Kuttner’s evidence, in short, of Democrats winning election in Blue states does not at all disprove the existence of a Red/Blue divide. Generally, though not always, it means that local voters make a distinction between the local Democrat whom they support and the true Blue national Democratic Party. Virginia, for example, clearly a Red state, has a Democratic governor, Mark Warner. If Kuttner really thinks Warner would have won had he not campaigned heavily on some classic Red themes such as his pro-gun stance, he should limit his writing to The American Prospect, where such silliness might not be noticed.
Denying the existence of a Red vs. Blue divide may be the only remaining occasion where some liberals are colorblind.
Please remind us exactly what you mean by a “red/blue divide”, and then give us good statistical evidence that it exists. Surely you’re not merely saying that there were two candidates running for president in our two-party system, and that some people voted for one while other people voted for the other.
Perhaps you mean that a large portion of the population can be partitioned into two large groups, such that no one from one group shares any significant opinions with anyone from the other. If so, please describe these two groups. If you tried to do this, my guess is that you yourself would be a typical and common instance of someone who belongs to neither group. As just one example: you have often presented evidence that many democrats oppose affirmative action and that many republicans do not.
On a related issue: A “contest decided by 10 points” may well be a “landslide” in the sense that it is unlikely that there is anything the losing side could have done in the two preceding weeks to change the outcome. However, in any social group, a 55/45 divide on an issue would be considered very close indeed and the group would be considered (as far as that issue is concerned) very homogeneous.
Surely you’re not merely saying that there were two candidates running for president in our two-party system, and that some people voted for one while other people voted for the other.
Surely not.
Perhaps you mean that a large portion of the population can be partitioned into two large groups, such that no one from one group shares any significant opinions with anyone from the other.
Nope, not that either.
It’s really not that complicated. Briefly, what I mean is that the conservative-liberal gap on a whole range of what are called cultural issues is now much wider than it has been throughout most (though not all) of our history, and that it has more of an overlap with our partisan divide than has been normal. In national elections there are far fewer culturally liberal Republicans and culturally conservative Democrats. Of course this doesn’t mean that every person, or any one person, fits completely into one camp, but that doesn’t mean the camps don’t exist.
I wouldn’t have thought this observation would be so controversial.
One of the original, and still one of the best, expositions of what I mean is David Brooks’s article,
“One Nation, Slightly Divisible,” which can be found here for those who are not ATLANTIC MONTHLY subscribers:
http://road.uww.edu/road/lunad/cb/16-Social%20Class/OneNation1.pdf
John-
Your link only provides about half the article.
Try this one:
http://pages.towson.edu/sovadia/SOCI243%5COne%20Nation,%20Slightly%20Divisible.htm
John —
Is there no statement of your assertion you can give me that is shorter and more rigorous than that article (which I really can’t follow)? After all, you are making a quantitative assertion not only about the present, but also about how the present compares with the past. How about some numbers? Are you asserting, for example, that a much larger percentage of (former) democrats voted for Nixon in 1972 than voted for Bush in 2004? That’s not what I would think.
I was in a university in the sixties and I am in one today. It seems to me that the political/cultural divide was more clear-cut then than now. For example, I am willing to bet that just about everyone who agreed with the left on abortion and welfare opposed the US war in Vietnam. In fact, I seem to recall that many people were describing the situation in the US back then as close to civil war. Of course, this is just a personal, subjective, non-quantitative view, but that is all we have so far.
As you know, I am no liberal.
But I try to resist the temptation to view the current TIMES IN WHICH WE LIVE as being different in all respects from the past. I also try, as often as possible, to be the second kind of person in the following quote:
“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are always saying that there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who aren’t.”
If I had to divide the world into two kinds of people, I would divide it into those who truly support Freedom of Speech, and those who don’t.
I just noticed this piece by Totten
http://instapundit.com/archives/024824.php
who argues against Wolcott’s version of “there are two kinds of people in the world”. In Wolcott’s version, apparently, the Christian fundamentalists make common cause with the neoconservatives to oppose all that is liberal.
(Of course Wolcott is an idiot, and I don’t mean to insult John by the comparison.)
LTEC,
I’ve managed to avoid reading Wolcott, but as you phrase his version of the state of things, there’s some truth to it. The Democratic Party is broadly committed to a fairly clear set of ideas about how the country should be run. There are large differences in emphasis, to be sure, and some actual serious internal disagreements about particular issues, but it would be difficult to find two people who both voted for Gore or Kerry and who disagreed with one another on every major substantive policy question.
For Bush voters, on the other hand, it would be easy. Free-trade social-libertarian foreign-policy hawks went for Bush; protectionist, isolationist social conservatives also by and large went for Bush. The two camps agreed on absolutely nothing beyond disliking some part of the Democratic program even more than they did parts of the Republican one.
Michelle —
I’ve read Wolcott (a little) so you won’t have to. As I understand him, his point is the opposite of yours: he thinks that there is no real difference between the neoconservatives and the fundamentalist Christians and the rest of “them”, whereas the real liberals are letting their petty differences tear the world apart.
My main point, however, is against facile categorization. (In fact, if the networks had never drawn their stupid colored maps, we probably wouldn’t even be talking about this.)
Another example is psychologists, who talk about “Type A” versus “Type B” people, or about the four dimensions along which one measures someone’s personality. Or literature people who divide up common ideas into “archetypes”.
When biologists categorize types of life, they do so with great care and a great deal of discussion, and there are quantitative reasons for the distinctions they make.
Let’s say that I want to demonstrate that there are two kinds of people in the world: smart people and stupid people. What would I have to do? First, I’d have to describe how I want to measure intelligence in a natural way. Then I’d present a graph of the intelligence of the population. If this graph had two clear humps, this would show I was right; if there was only one hump, then any classification of people into smart and stupid would be completely arbitrary. If I wanted to demonstrate that the distinction between smart and stupid is even stronger than it used to be, then things would get even more complicated.
Without getting too deep into this issue, I will simply note that many states, like Michigan and Ohio, were in fact very closely divided.
Also, if you look back at the 2000 election, there were swings of 20-30 percentile points in both directions before the actual election.
I was therefore amazed at the time that the press talked about a “Deeply” divided nation, when it was at best “evenly” divided. If the division was really that deep, there would never have been those kinds of swings involved.
I also don’t think most Bush voters are even that that focused on cultural issues. I think they simply don’t trust the Dems to fight a war on terror, especially when they often appear to be undercutting our current efforts.
There are three kinds of people in this world: those who can count and those who can’t.
notherbob2,
And what are the other two kinds?
I think facile categorization is underrated. Or, more precisely, overdemonized.
Any model of any complex system is going to be imperfect, and it’s crucial not to imbue a model with superpowers that aren’t there. In other words, you need to be aware of your model’s limitations. But refusing to use any model less complex than the system being described is also a mistake. A simple model can help one explore the most important aspects of a system without getting weighed down in the less important aspects.
The red/blue divide doesn’t need to be perfect to be useful. As a right-wing egghead, I have sympathies with both sides. But I don’t think it’s meaningless to discuss liberal or conservative perspectives on the world. It just needs to be taken with the right amount of salt.