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One week after a historic presidential campaign that ended with the election of a man who billed himself as a post-partisan candidate of a unified America, this country is more divided than it was four or eight years ago. Or, less abstractly, while some danced in the streets over Barack Obama's victory, others bought guns. Here are some preliminary results from Tuesday's election:
• Communities are just as partisan now as they were in 2004.
Most counties in the United States have grown either more Republican or more Democratic since the 1970s. In 1976, 26.8 percent of the nation's voters lived in a county where either Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter won by more than 20 percentage points. The number of people living in these "landslide counties" increased to 38 percent in 1992, to 45.3 percent in 2000, to 48.3 percent in 2004.
On Tuesday, 48.1 percent of the vote came from counties where either Obama or McCain won by 20 percentage points or more.
Partisanship is now more Democratic. Four years ago, 83 million people lived in Republican-landslide counties. Now it's closer to 53 million. In 2004, 64 million people lived in Democratic-landslide counties. In 2008, 94 million people lived in Obama-landslide counties.
That means that blue counties got bluer while red counties paled a tinge. The number of people living in counties that are overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic is unchanged from 2004.
• States are more divided.
Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz tracks the growing differences among states. He finds the same divisions in the country as four years ago, "only deeper."
In 1976, the average winning margin in the 50 states and Washington, D.C., was 10 percentage points. In 2000, it was 15 points. In 2004 it was 16 points. In 2008 the average winning margin for the 50 states and D.C. was 17.4 percentage points.
There are more landslide states (where a candidate won by 10 points or more). In 1976, there were 19 blowout states plus the District of Columbia. In 2004, there were 29 blowout states plus D.C.
In 2008, there were 36 landslide states plus D.C.
And there were fewer states where the election was relatively competitive, less than five percentage points. In 1976, 20 states were competitive. By 2004, there were only 11 competitive states. This time out, only seven states had margins of less than five points. (They were Missouri, North Carolina, Indiana, Florida, Montana, Ohio, and Virginia.)
"There may be only one United States of America, as Sen. Obama says," Abramowitz said, "but the divide between the red states and the blue states is deeper than at any time in the past 60 years."
• The division between rural America and urban America grew wider.
In 1976, there was little difference in the voting patterns of Americans living in rural and urban counties. By 2004, George Bush won 59 percent of the vote in the nation's rural counties while John Kerry took 40 percent.
Obama did better than Kerry, winning 42.8 percent of the rural vote overall, and he did much better than that in the battleground states. In Indiana, for example, Kerry won only 31.9 percent of the rural vote. Obama won 43 percent of the rural vote and, with it, the state.
Meanwhile, Obama's vote in the cities jumped dramatically over what the Democrat polled in '04. John Kerry took 51.6 percent of the urban vote. Barack Obama won 57 percent of the vote in the core metropolitan counties.
In a sense, 2008 was the inverse of 2004. Four years ago, George W. Bush tuned up the vote in rural and exurban counties and battled to stay close in urban America. In this election, Obama pumped out votes in urban precincts and then did a bit better than Kerry or Al Gore did in rural and exurban counties.
As a result, the gap between the urban and rural vote increased from '04 to ‘08.
Republican and Democratic counties were entirely different kinds of places. The average population of an Obama landslide county was 278,601. The average McCain landslide county had 37,475 people.
• Modern political campaigns continue to be designed to increase political divisions.
Obama's rural campaign consisted of finding the "urban" vote in small towns. For instance, Obama held a rally in Harrisonburg, Va., in the last week of the campaign. It was an unlikely place to find a Democrat. Harrisonburg had voted for every Republican presidential candidate since before the end of World War II. The last Democrat to visit that neck of the Shenandoah Valley was Stephen Douglas in 1860.
Obama targeted Harrisonburg because it was home to two universities, James Madison and Eastern Mennonite, and Mary Baldwin College was tucked into nearby Staunton (which also hadn't voted Democratic in more than 60 years). These were likely Obama voters, and so the campaign went after them. The James Madison precinct recorded the most votes ever-and Obama won Harrisonburg and Staunton.
The counties surrounding these two college towns, however, voted for McCain by a 7-to-3 margin.
Obama plucked these college towns from all over rural America. The only county Obama won in southeast Ohio was Athens, home of Ohio University. In western (Appalachian) North Carolina, Obama won Watauga County, home of Appalachian State University. There was one speck of blue in the Idaho panhandle: Latah County, where students attend the University of Idaho.
Political campaigns these days aren't designed to change minds. Candidates target voters who are already likely to support them-and then the campaigns feed these voters more of what they want to hear. That's a strategy that is all about polarization, and it works.
• People kept sorting.
From 2003 to 2007, people leaving counties that voted Democratic in 2004 likely moved to other Democratic counties, according to statistician Robert Cushing's parsing of federal migration data. The trend tended to increase the number of Democrats in counties that already voted for Democratic presidential candidates.
Republicans didn't cluster as strongly over that four-year stretch. In fact, Republican counties in Democratic states got a majority of their new residents from people who were moving from counties that voted for John Kerry. That could be a reason the Republican vote softened in some areas in '08.
This is the Big Sort, the self-selection of people into increasingly like-minded communities at microscopic levels of society.
• Young people clustered, and where they gathered, the vote was Democratic.
People of first-time voting age (18 to 21) increased their numbers in Obama-landslide counties four times faster than in McCain-landslide counties. According to Cushing's calculations, there were 10.5 million 18-to-21-year-old voters in counties Obama won. In McCain counties, there were 6.4 million of these young voters.
The Sort Continues
The vote last week was transformative in a sense. In many ways, however, the election produced no change at all. The country is split in much the same way it was divided four and eight years ago. People continue to sort by age and by way of life. As a result, our communities (and states) are growing more like-minded.
Oh, and there is the continuing and stark racial division in both the geography and how Americans live. In Republican-landslide counties, blacks and Hispanics are distinct minorities. Where McCain won by 20 percentage points or more, there were five Anglos of voting age for every black or Hispanic, Cushing found. In Obama-landslide counties, there are 1.3 whites for every black or Hispanic. Obama counties and McCain counties are very different places.
Liberals and Democrats seem to think the country's divisions have disappeared just because their man won. And it is easy to ignore people on the other side when they aren't your neighbors. But that doesn't mean the country is less polarized-because it isn't.
(Editor's note: This is the final post for Slate's Big Sort blog. You can read more from Bill Bishop at his Web site covering rural America, the Daily Yonder, and you can read more about the Big Sort itself in his book of the same name.)
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When Sam Gosling studied the differences between liberal and conservative college students, he and his colleagues went snooping for cleaning supplies. In the dorm rooms of conservatives, they found more cans of Ajax and ironing boards.
In an unpublished paper titled "The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives," Gosling, a psychology professor at the University of Texas, and three other colleagues* looked for the underlying personality traits that defined left and right. Gosling is the author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. He's a specialist in analyzing what the things people have around them say about their personalities and beliefs. When it comes to politics, your stuff does define you.
Gosling's theory is that "ideological differences between left and right are partially rooted in basic personality dispositions." In particular, Gosling and his co-authors hypothesized that liberals and conservatives differed in two major "personality dimensions." Liberals are more likely to be open to experiences. Conservatives would score higher on measures of conscientiousness. Liberals would be more motivated by curiosity, creativity, and diversity of experiences. Conservatives would value following the rules, self-control, and order.
The psychologists conducted three tests, and they all produced evidence that liberals did show more openness to experience and conservatives did tend to be attracted to normality. The social scientists took polls and observed subjects in these tests, but the snooping came when investigators looked for physical clues in dorm rooms and offices.
Conservatives' bedrooms tended to have more calendars and postage stamps. They had more flags and sports posters. Conservatives' bedrooms were neater and better lit—they had more laundry baskets, ironing boards, cleaning supplies, and sewing thread.
Liberals' bedrooms had a greater variety of books (especially books about travel, feminism, and music). They had more CDs and a greater variety of music (folk, world, classical). Liberal bedrooms had more art supplies, cultural memorabilia, and maps of other countries.
These same traits carried over to the work life. Conservatives' offices "tended to be more conventional, less stylish, and less comfortable compared with liberal offices." Liberals' offices were more colorful and contained more CDs and "a greater variety of books."
In summarizing their findings, the four authors concluded, "Liberals did appear to be more open, tolerant, creative, curious, expressive, enthusiastic, and drawn to novelty and diversity, in comparison with conservatives, who appeared to be more conventional, orderly, organized, neat, clean, withdrawn, reserved, rigid, and relatively intolerant." Ideological differences were indeed more than skin deep.
And these personality differences varied geographically across the nation. In an earlier paper, Gosling found that those open to experience were more likely to live in California, Washington, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maryland, and Colorado.
Conscientious states included Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida.
Notice a pattern? Like that all but two of the "openness" states in 2004 voted for John Kerry and all but one of the conscientious states sided with George Bush?
Statistician Bob Cushing found these same differences at the metropolitan level using an entirely different set of data. In a study of how people were sorting by city, Cushing compared personality traits in high-tech cities and low-tech cities. High-tech cities were determined by their tech output and patents per capita. There were 21 cities that placed above the national average in both categories, metro areas such as Boise, Austin, Atlanta, Seattle, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, and Portland.
People living in high-tech cities were more interested in other places and cultures. They were more likely to "try anything once." They were more likely to be optimistic and to engage in individualistic activities. High-tech cities grew increasingly Democratic in presidential elections from 1980 to 2004 as they collected more people who described themselves as "liberal." (See our book, The Big Sort, for details.)
The 130 cities with the lowest levels of tech output and patent production grew increasingly Republican. Cushing found that people living in these places were more supportive of traditional authority, more family-oriented, more likely to engage in social activities with other people and more likely to attend church. People who described themselves as conservative were more likely to move there.
The differences—political, ideological, and cultural—were growing between low-tech and high-tech metros.
The election next week may well be a landslide. That doesn't mean the basic divisions in the country have gone away. "Political orientation appears to pervade almost every aspect of our public and private lives, possibly now more than in recent decades," Gosling and his co-authors write. "Not only does it describe how we think about and what we value in terms of government and society as a whole, but it also appears to leave its mark on how we behave toward others, travel, decorate our walls, clean our bodies and our homes, and on how we choose to spend our free time."
The Republican Party is likely to end next Tuesday in a shambles. That's when the countdown begins for the time when these basic American differences will re-emerge in our politics.
*"The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind" was co-authored by Gosling, Dana R. Carney at Columbia University, John T. Jost of New York University, and Jeff Potter of Atof Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.
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Enough already with the words. Think of this as The Big Sort scorecard for the election, several different ways of seeing how the geographic clustering of like-minded citizens plays out in presidential elections.
First, the sort itself. Here we compare the "landslide counties" in the 1976 and 2004 elections. (Landslide counties are those in which one candidate won by 20 percentage points or more, counting only Republican and Democratic votes.) Both '76 and '04 were close contests, but the distribution of the vote changed dramatically over those 28 years.
In 1976, 26.8 percent of voters lived in a landslide county. (Democratic landslide counties are in black; Republican landslides are gray.) In close elections, the percentage of voters living in landslide counties rose steadily. By 2004, 48.3 percent of voters lived in a county where the contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry wasn't close at all. About six of every 10 counties were won by landslide margins in '04.
In 1976, Democrats won the vote in rural America. Bill Clinton broke even in rural America in 1996, and then rural counties went solidly Republican. So did the exurbs. Cities—particularly cities that produced loads of technology and patents—swerved Democratic.
Basically, the more dense the population, the greater the Democratic vote.
One way to track the election is by this rural/exurban/urban breakdown in each state. Thanks to Tim Murphy and the Daily Yonder, we do that in the chart below for the 2004 election. You can see that rural and exurban votes were essential to President Bush's victory.
(For those who wonder about such things, "rural" here are what the OMB and the census classify as "non-metro." "Urban" counties are called "metro" by the feds. Geographer Tim Murphy created an "exurban" category from "metro" counties where 40 percent to 50 percent of the residents live in rural settings. On the bottom line, you can see that rural counties had 17.4 percent of the vote, exurban counties had 9.2 percent of the vote, and urban counties had 73.4 percent of the vote.)
Given The New Yorker's recent interest in the political significance of ancestry, I wondered why we shouldn't go straight to the source. This map comes from our friends at the U.S. Census. It shows the ancestry group with the largest population in each county. (Ancestry is self-reported.) It's sort of fun to switch back and forth between the 2004 landslide map and the ancestry map. You can see that Democrats didn't do well where the dominant ancestry group was "American." Maybe these are the folks Gov. Sarah Palin had in mind.
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Political polling parses data according to broad demographic categories—by sex, age, education, race, religion. The polls have been run this way for years, which makes it easy to compare results from election to election. It doesn't matter that these demographic descriptions are only a faint approximation of how people define their lives and politics. This is the tool political reporters have, and so they use it. (What's the line about having a hammer makes everything look like nails?)
Marketing people tell me they use demographic data only when they can't get the good stuff—the polling that much more precisely identifies how people will buy (or vote) based on more detailed lifestyle preferences. But when they can't get the lifestyle data, then sometimes demographic data provides an approximation of what's really happening.
So it is with women, who over the past generation have become more likely to vote Democratic. The numbers go up and down with the dynamics of a particular campaign, but the trend is there. To stop with gender is to stop too soon.
Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson wrote The Cultural Creatives in 2000 based on polling they had conducted over the years. They identified a cultural shift taking place, a change in values. A growing number of people were more concerned with protecting the environment than with expanding the economy. Cultural creatives sought deep relationships and were rolling their own spiritual lives rather than turning religion over to the establishment church.
Other researchers were finding the same trends. Daniel Yankelovich in the marketing world saw the ascendance of values over class, education, or work. Ron Inglehart wrote about a "culture shift" from his perch at the University of Michigan. Ruy Teixeira and John Judis predicted a new Democratic majority coming out of the culture being created in the fast-growing tech cities.
What Ray and Anderson realized is that this culture shift was taking place faster among women than men. More women were interested in alternative religions, holistic medicines, individual rights, and environmental protection than men. When the two researchers counted up the core group of "cultural creatives," they found that two-thirds were women.
More single women are Democrats because more single women are cultural creatives. "It's not 'the demographics,' " Ray and Anderson wrote. Sure, it's simple to separate people by gender, education, income, and the color of their collars, they wrote, but "those conventional categories show only a thin slice of people's lives." To understand why people act and vote the way they do, you had to find their values.
So, where are all the good men? Demographically, of course, there are just as many men as there have ever been. But when Ray and Anderson examine values, not demography, they find a serious shortage of culturally creative men. "The bad news (for women) is that there aren't enough men to go around," Ray and Anderson write. There are lots of women looking for a new kind of relationship and too many men dropping out of college, watching mixed-martial-arts matches on television, and voting Republican.
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French students who disliked America (and loved Charles de Gaulle) were once asked to talk about the United States for an hour or two. At the end of the session, conducted as part of experiments in the 1960s, the students disliked America—and loved de Gaulle—even more.
College kids who join a conservative fraternity move to the right during their four years in college. Liberals from Boulder asked to discuss some issues of the day, such as global warming and gay marriage, are more liberal at the end of their discussion than before. Racists brought into a room to discuss race grow more intolerant.
Social psychologists have conducted scores of these "group polarization" experiments since the '60s, and they all come to the same finding: Like-minded people in a group grow more extreme in the way they are like-minded.
Homogeneity creates extremity—or, in the news of the day, a McCain rally.
Republican rallies this past weekend grew heated. The headlines tell the story: "Anger Is Crowd's Overarching Emotion at McCain Rally"; "Panic Attack: Voters Unload at GOP Rallies"; "McCain: Obama Not an Arab, Crowd Boos"; "Supporters Jeer as McCain Calls Obama 'A Decent Person.' "
What's going on? The talk-show talk has been that John McCain and Sarah Palin incite this kind of behavior. They certainly haven't helped, but blaming the candidates misses what's happening, and why.
Social scientists have proposed several reasons for why like-minded groups tend to polarize. Two have survived scrutiny. The first is that homogenous groups are privy to a large pool of ideas and arguments supporting the group's dominant position. Everybody hears the arguments in favor of the group's belief, and as they're discussed, people grow stouter in their beliefs.
The second reason like-minded groups polarize has more to do with how we see ourselves. We are constantly comparing our beliefs and opinions to those of the group. There are advantages to being slightly more extreme than the group average. It's a way to stand out, to ensure others will see us as righteous group members.
"It's an image-maintenance kind of thing," explained social psychologist Robert Baron. Everybody wants to be a member in good standing, and though it sounds counterintuitive, the safest way to conform is to be slightly more extreme than the average of the group.
"One way to make sure you aren't mistaken for one of those 'other people' is to be slightly ahead of the pack in terms of your Republican-ness," Baron said. "It's hard to be a moderate Republican or a moderate Democrat, in other words, because you're afraid that other people will call you whatever. In racial terms, you'd be called an Oreo if you were black." At a John McCain rally, if you say Barack Obama is a "decent family man," you are booed ... even if you're John McCain.
This is social psychology as old as the Bible. Recalling his days as a devout Jew, before his conversion to Christianity, Paul said, "Beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it." Paul realized that his extremity paid dividends, that he "profited in the Jews' religion above many of my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers." (Galatians 1:13-14)
Or, as Holly Golightly put it in Breakfast at Tiffany's, "It's useful being top banana in the shock department."
Experiments confirmed Paul's and Golightly's conclusions. "An extreme communicator on one's side of an issue tends to be perceived as more sincere and competent than a moderate," social psychologist David Myers wrote. Hello, talk radio.
Those at the McCain or Palin rallies who talk about "hooligans" and "treason," who call Barack Obama a "terrorist," "bum," or "socialist," aren't simply responding to speeches from the candidates. They are acting as members of a like-minded group exactly as social psychologists would predict, which is a less-than-comforting thought.
In his textbook on social psychology, David Myers writes, "Terrorism does not erupt suddenly. Rather, it arises among people whose shared grievances bring them together. As they interact in isolation from moderating influences, they become progressively more extreme. The social amplifier brings the signal in stronger. The result is violent acts that the individuals, apart from the group, would never have committed."
It's not just groups on the right that polarize, nor are Republicans the only people to gather in like-minded groups. For the past 30 years, Americans have been sorting themselves into politically like-minded neighborhoods, churches, and clubs. Matching like with like has been often been entirely intentional. Ministers have been taught to attract new members according to the "homogenous unit principle" of church growth. (One book in the church growth literature is titled Our Kind of People.) Subdivisions have designed for certain cultural types—a Christian school in one section, a Montessori school in another.
The antidote to group polarization is mixed company. Cass Sunstein and David Schkade reviewed the rulings from three panels from the U.S. Court of Appeals. They found that when the panels consisted of all Republican or all Democratic appointees, the rulings were more extreme than when the panels had members of both parties. Mixed panels produced more moderate judgments.
The lesson is pretty clear. Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain individual excesses. Homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.
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Seeing the McCain campaign's advertisement claiming Obama voted to teach sex education to kindergarteners was like flipping across the radio dial and stopping on a great oldies station. Sex ed in the schools? Gosh, we haven't heard that one in a while.
The set-piece wisdom in politics is that, in general-election campaigns, candidates must run to the middle. They have to move away from their more ideological supporters in order to scoop up all those independent voters lurking in the ideological center.
But part of the big sort has been a decrease in these independent voters over the past 30 years. Moreover, there's good evidence that general-election voters are no less partisan or ideological than primary voters—and that candidates who moderate their tone risk alienating their supporters.
The Bush campaign in 2004 was the first to realize these generation-long trends. They looked at their polls in January of that year and saw that nobody was left in the middle. (Hey, how many truly undecided voters do you know?) At that point, they switched from a campaign aimed at convincing independents to one geared at turning out supporters. What the McCain sex-ed ad tells me is that the Republicans think they can win this thing by moving away from the middle. No need to compromise. Just fire up those supporters and party like it's 2004.
Sex education is an oldie but a goodie because it's about so much more than sex or education. Some of the earliest coalitions in the conservative movement were formed around schoolbook fights. In Orange County, California, anti-U.N.ers found common cause with evangelicals and small-government libertarians in late-'60s battles over what books should be used in the public schools. Sex education and books were a proxy for a constellation of beliefs that were defining modern-day conservatism.
Maybe we can see this phenomenon more clearly if we take a trip back to 1974 and the great Kanawha County, W.Va., schoolbook war.
In the spring of that year, the local school board introduced a new set of "multicultural" texts. There had been a dispute about sex education in the Kanawha schools a year or two earlier, and one of the leaders of that protest had been elected to the board. She began to talk against the books, saying they violated "traditional Christian and American values." Parents met. Then they protested. By the end of summer, they were holding mass marches in Charleston. And when school started, parents kept their children out of the classrooms. By the fall, much of the state's coal-mining industry was shut down as union miners went on strike over the books. Things got out of hand. One minister prayed publicly for the deaths of three school board members. Shots were fired at a school bus, somebody dynamited a school, and several folks went to jail.
Ten years after the strike ended, a graduate student interviewed a large group of West Virginia's schoolbook warriors. Don Goode found that pro- and anti-schoolbook advocates disagreed not just about schools but about everything.
Pro-book advocates believed in government and thought that perhaps taxes should be raised. They supported the Supreme Court's ruling that prayer be banned from schools. They thought schools should serve hot meals to poor kids and provide day care. Pro-book West Virginians went to mainline churches (Methodist and Episcopalian) and lived mostly in the city of Charleston.
Anti-book activists told Goode they disagreed with the Supreme Court's prayer decision. They thought government was too big, that tax money was wasted, and that schools shouldn't try to take the place of families. They lived in the rural areas of Kanawha County and worshipped at nondenominational churches like the Two-Mile Mountain Mission Church and the Open Door Apostolic Church.
Goode also asked the West Virginians what values they thought were most important. Those who thought the new textbooks were OK ranked a "world of beauty in nature and the arts" quite high on Goode's list of 18 values. They agreed that having a "saved, eternal life" was least important.
Those who opposed the books ranked eternal salvation first.
Talk about your two Americas ...
McCain's advertisement wasn't about sex education. It was telling people McCain adhered to a matrix of beliefs that has defined conservatives for two generations. The sex-ed ad said the candidate would maintain traditional authority, build a strong military, and appoint conservative judges to the courts. In one 30-second ad, the Republican could send a message about faith, foreign policy, the size of government, and taxes. The political message was that McCain believes he can win without expanding the party, compromising, or promising some dreamy post-partisan future.
These boys are hunkering down. And the only people who misunderstood what McCain meant were those who thought the ad had something to do with a bill Barack Obama supported in the Illinois state senate.