The Big Sort (64 page)
Authors: Bill Bishop
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* It's important to note the timing of these political changes. Hacker and Pierson marked the change in the Republican Party as taking off in 1975 (
Off Center,
p 26)âthe same time Americans began to sort racially, educationally, religiously, and politically.
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* The best theater for both films, however, was the Empire 25 venue in New York City's Times Square
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* "That division held in the 2006 midterm elections. Three-quarters of Missouri voters who supported Democrat Claire McCaskill for the U.S. Senate also voted for a constitutional amendment that would protect stem cell research, according to exit polls. Three-quarters of those who voted for Republican incumbent Jim Talent voted against the measure A person's position on stem cell research told almost as much about his or her vote as whether the person saw himself or herself as liberal or conservative.
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* "This district was gerrymandered in an unusual special session of the Texas legislature in 2003âthe bizarre summer session orchestrated by former Senate majority leader Tom DeLay This was the second redisricting in Texas since the 2000 census. Democratic legislators hid for several weeks at a Holiday Inn in Ardmore, Oklahoma, to protest what they considered a legislative heist.
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â Wohlgemuth lost to Edwards in the fall of 2004
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* Council seats in Houston are nonpartisan, but everyone knows the party affiliations of members.
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* Moreover, women in Congress are more polarized than their male colleagues. Brian Frederick at Northern Illinois University compared Democratic and Republican women members of Congress in the first two years of Bush's second term and found them further apart ideologically than their male colleagues See Brian Frederick, "The Feminine Side of Polarization in the U.S. House" (paper prepared for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 30âSeptember 3, 2006).
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â In
Polarized America
, McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal contended that polarization has its strongest impact on poorer Americans The failure of Congress to raise the minimum wage for so long was typical (It was finally raised in 2007 after ten years.) Polarization tends to work to the advantage of conservatives, especially regarding social spending.
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* The conflict over the exit polls rolled on through 2005 and 2006. Mark Hertsgaard asked, "Is it really so strange to imagine that Bush supportersâwho tend to distrust the supposedly liberal news mediaâmight not answer questions from pollsters bearing the logos of CBS, CNN, and the other news organizations financing the polling operation'" ("Was Ohio Stolen in 2004 or Wasn't It'"
Mother Jones,
November/December 2005) Robert F. Kennedy Jr devoted more than 14,000 words to this question in an article posted in June 2006 on
RollingStone com
(
http://www.rollingstone com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
) Kennedy concluded that the discrepancies between the exit polls and the actual results indicated that the 2004 election had been stolen Steven F Freeman and Joel Bleifuss published a book titled
Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?
(2006). Michael Kinsley, in his review of the book in the
New York Times
(November 5, 2006), wrote that "the whole stolen-election-2004 indictment has that echo-chamber sound of people having soul-searching conversations with each other. Richard Hofstadter's 'paranoid style,' exhibited mainly on the right when he coined the term in the 1960s, seems to have been adopted by the left"
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* Marketers know that these kinds of databases are filled with problemsâmissing data fields, for example, or confusion over names and addresses. (In fact, one of the early contests of the 2008 presidential campaign will be over who controls the good lists that came out of 2006.) Of course, marketers don't care about accuracy, only results. In marketing terms, they are looking for "lift." So they constantly test their data, trying to improve its predictive power. That's exactly what the Republicans did during the campaign. In Portland, Oregon, Patrick Donaldson told me that his phone bank workers were told to ask two or three new questions each night. The answers were transmitted back to the main database. The next night, they asked another group of questions, so the party's information was being constantly improved. The party's ability to target voters improved daily.
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* Even after what can be described only as a disastrous two years, 84 percent of self-described Republicans approved of Bush's handling of the presidency on Election Day 2006, according to House exit polls, only 18 percent of Democrats approved.
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â Even Philip Converse, who tracked the decline in party allegiance to six months in the middle of 1965, didn't foresee the rebound in partisanship. In his 1976 book
The Dynamics of Party Support,
Converse projected only a modest restoration of support for political parties. His most extreme projections, in fact, fell far below the levels of partisanship Dowd found in 2000 (pp 113â16).
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* "Pollster Neil Newhouse, with Public Opinion Strategies, told a conference at Princeton University in December 2004 that in a survey his firm had conducted in Arlington County, in northern Virginia, 20 percent of the voters said that they would vote for the Democratic candidate for county commissioner because they disapproved of President George W. Bush.
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â Academics would confirm the Republicans' supposition. "Our interpretation emphasizes partisans' sense that they are part of a team," Donald Green, Bradley Palmquist, and Eric Schickler wrote in their book
Partisan Hearts and Minds
(New Haven, C T Yale University Press, 2002, p 219)
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* To read more about Dowd's ideas, see Douglas B. Sosmk, Matthew J. Dowd, and Ron Fournier,
Applebee's America How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community
(2006).
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* When asked to explain his approach to politics, Karl Rove quoted from a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to his Whig Party campaign committee: "Keep a constant watch on the doubtful voters, and from time to time have them talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote that Rove's contribution to twenty-first-century campaigns was to "bring this peer-to-peer politics to a continental scale" ("What History Taught Karl Rove,"
Washington Post,
August 17, 2007).
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* There are notable exceptions, however, such as the Texas cities of Houston and Dallasâhigh-tech metro areas that are staunchly Republican.
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â A study by University of California, Irvine, economist Jan Brueckner found that for every 10 percent decline in population density, the chances that people would talk to their neighbors at least once a week increased by 10 percent. The suburbs didn't destroy social networks, in fact, contact between homogeneous neighbors increased as places became more Republican. (See Roy Rivenburg, "Where to Hear 'Hi, Neighbor!'. In the Suburbs,"
Los Angeles Times,
November 27, 2006.) The Bush campaign devised by Dowd and Mehlman tapped into this strong social network.
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* The religious right was officially left for dead by the media in 2000 Michael Kelly wrote in his
Washington Post
column on March 1, 2000, "The hour of the Christian right is well past." On February 16, 2000, Hana Rosin wrote about the religious right in the
Washington Post
under the headline "Christian Right's Fervor Has Fizzled." Similar columns and stories were written after the Republican defeat in 2006.
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â Preachers aren't necessarily the best canvassers even for their own churches Ed Stetzer, in
Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age
, told of a study that found that ministers who made followup visits to newcomers were only half as effective at bringing these people into the church as lay members
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* "The GOP promotes its causes through naturally occurring community groups of like-minded people . ," Columbia University sociologist Dana R. Fisher wrote. "Democrats, however, often outsource their politics, relying on artificial, virtual networks and professional canvassers to evangelize their message and build their party" ("Ending Rot in America's Grass Roots,"
Christian Science Monitor
, October 30, 2006).
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â According to Dowd, the Bush campaign relied on Jon Berry and Ed Keller's 2003 book
The Influentials
. which updated and expanded the original Roper findings.
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* For good reason, much has been made of the Florida vote in 2000, but it's just as important that Bush carried West Virginia The Bush campaign seemed to turn in West Virginia after Charlton Heston stirred a large crowd at an NRA rally in Beckley just a week before the election.
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* The entire affect of the Kerry campaign put off rural voters. "I'll give you one example in the Kerry campaign," Oregon county commissioner Bill Bellamy told me. "His wife was an arrogant bitch "
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* There was a similar boomlet of excitement about the Jewish vote In 2004, nearly eight out of ten Jews had voted Democratic. In 2006, it was nine out of ten
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â Nor was there any increase in the number of true independents. Political scientist Gary Jacobson told
Newsweek
at the time of the election that only about 5 or 6 percent of voters were truly undecided See Susanna Schrobsdorff, "A More Liberal Electorate' Not Yet,"
MSNBC.com/Newsweek
, November 9, 2006,
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15643639/site/newsweek/prmt/1/displaymode/1098/
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â¡ New Hampshire voters defeated both incumbent Republican House members and switched the state legislature from Republican to Democratic majorities largely on the strength of straight-ticket voting. David Broder reported in the
Washington Post
(November 26, 2006) that there were 80,000 straight-ticket Democratic voters in New Hampshire in 2006, twice the number of straight-ticket Republicans Aaron Blake noted in the
Hill
(November 20, 2006) that an increase in straight-ticket voting by Democrats was evident in several House races. According to Blake, straight-ticket Democratic voting jumped by 41 percent over 2002 levels in two of the most populous counties in Iowa representative Jim Leach's district Leach, a Republican, lost. Straight-ticket Democratic voting doubled in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania districts where Republicans lost.
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* Republican representative ]im Leach opposed the war in Iraq and was the most liberal Republican in the House. But Leach's Iowa district had given Kerry the highest vote percentage of any Republican House district in 2004, and in a system that was aligning itself top to bottom, Leach lost in 2006 after spending thirty years in Congress.
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* One of the more famous experiments regarding discrimination was conducted in a small Iowa town by a third-grade teacher after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Jane Elliott told her all-white students that blue-eyed students were superior to brown-eyed students. The creation of these arbitrary groups quickly resulted in the most base kind of discrimination, students were excluded from play because of their eye color, and blue-eyed students asserted their superiority over brown-eyed students. Descriptions and videos of Elliott's experiment can be found at
http://www.janeelliott.com/index.htm
.
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* Schkade and Sunstein assigned a simple ten-point scale (ranging from very strongly agree to very strongly disagree) that participants marked in answering three questions, one each about affirmative action, global warming, and gay marriage. The difference between the answers given by the individuals from Colorado Springs and those given by the individuals from Boulder averaged 4.59 points before deliberation After deliberation, the difference between the groups had grown to 6.24.
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* GIuckman quoted T S. Eliot's observation on the need for overlapping and conflicting connections "Indeed, the more the better so that everyone should be an ally of everyone else in some respects, and an opponent in several others, and no one conflict, envy or fear will predominate" (quoted in Gluckman,
Custom and Conflict in Africa,
p 2).
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* "The correlation between spouses' ideological orientations is strong," wrote political scientists Melissa Marschall and Wendy Rahn. These researchers also have found that online dating services specifically match clients with similar political views, a technological feat that "makes assortive mating ever more convenient." See "Birds of a Political Feather- Ideology, Partisanship, and Geographic Sorting in the American Electorate" (paper prepared for the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, April 21, 2006, pp 6â7).
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â lllinois senator Barack Obama presented himself early in the 2008 campaign as the man of the earth candidate, the politician able and eager to speak toâand listen toâall sides.
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* In a bizarre arrangement, private equity firms attempting to buy the huge Texas utility TXU offered Austin $30 million to help fund a pollution reduction plan for central Texas. The offer, however, came with a catch, local officials had to agree not to oppose TXU's plans to build a series of coal-fired power plants. See Claudia Gnsales, "TXU Offer $30 Million to Smooth Plant Deal,"
Austin American-Statesman,
June 8, 2007, p. A1.
