The Big Sort: Where you live, how you vote.

No, We Didn’t: America Hasn't Changed as Much as Tuesday’s Results Would Indicate

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.)

The Stuff in Your Bedroom Signals How You Vote

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.

Why the Workplace Is Essential to Democracy

Answers of a Political Sort

If This Is a "Change" Election, Then What's Changed?

Let's consider what's not new in this election.

There's a lot. The last five or six elections have been pushed along by trends that have been in place since the mid-1970s. Despite the extraordinary circumstances this year, the basic political contours of the country haven't changed (or haven't changed yet!).

If anything, 2008 appears to be more an extension of the 2006 midterms, an election that changed little in the country's basic political makeup from 2004—except, of course, for the name of the winning party. More on that tomorrow. Today, let's consider how static our politics have been.

Churchgoers Are Still Republicans
Thirty years ago, how often you went to church didn't mark you as a Democrat or a Republican. Evangelicals didn't have a party.

As the parties sorted according to lifestyle instead of class, weekly churchgoers and evangelicals became reliably Republican voters in presidential races. There's no evidence this is changing. Oh, there have been plenty of stories about the breakup of the evangelical vote. I'd read the stories, but the more hardheaded pollsters and religion scholars would find, as John Green did last month, that "Barack Obama's attempt to reach out to Christian voters ... is failing."

In the fall of 2004, George Bush had a 60.4 percent to 19.6 percent edge over John Kerry among evangelicals. This year, Green found, McCain leads Obama 57.2 percent to 19.9 percent. Maybe that will change, but it hasn't yet, according to Gallup. Evangelicals and churchgoers may be "lukewarm" about McCain, but they are still supporting him in numbers just a smidgen below 2004 levels.

Women Voting Democratic
In the 1970s, more women voted Republican than men. Over the past 30 years, they have increasingly voted Democratic. Again, there was a spate of stories about a reversal in this arrangement, but by late September Gallup had women supporting Obama 52 percent to 39 percent.

Fewer Genuine Independents
Political reporters love the story about the rise of the independent voter and the "decline of parties." But over the past 30 years, the number of true independents has declined, and allegiance to party has grown stronger. (Princeton's Larry Bartels wrote the most important paper on this phenomenon.)

Yes, there are more people who register as independent or tell pollsters they are independent. But almost all these people vote reliably for one party or the other. People tell pollsters that they are independents, but when pressed, they admit that they almost always vote for the same party.

Split-Ticket Voters Disappearing
Split-ticket voting has been declining for the past 30 years, too. We are less inclined to pick and choose between parties. People are picking sides and voting that way up and down the ballot. That was especially true in 2006, when Democrats, especially, cast large numbers of straight-ticket votes in New Hampshire, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Rural Is Still Republican
Rural voters have been moving toward the Republican Party since the '70s. That trend continues, too. 

Replay 2006
Democrats thought the 2006 midterms were a turning point. They weren't. All these trends stayed in place. Just the results changed. Tomorrow we'll see why 2006 is a good model for 2008.

Why House Members Aren't Supposed To Just "Vote Their Districts"

House members say phone calls are running 9-1 against the financial rescue bill, and that raises a question. If people really oppose the bill in those numbers—and there are signs they don't—shouldn't "representatives" vote that way?

That was the practice in Colonial New England town meetings, writes Michael Schudson in The Good Citizen. Citizens elected representatives at town gatherings, and "there was a tendency for the meetings to control representatives by providing them mandates or instructions to carry out."

The ties between elected official and voter were looser in the middle and Southern colonies, but the notion that representatives should pay any attention at all to citizens was something that distinguished American democracy. In Britain, representation didn't mean that there would be consultation with voters. Accountability came with elections. Between votes, British representatives made up their own minds. In the colonies, however, representation "had begun to imply, as it did not in England, that the representative should not only use his own judgment but also speak for his constituency." Representatives were "expected to possess local knowledge and to identify with the interests of their constituents." They were supposed to "vote the district."

The conflict early in American democracy, Schudson wrote, tugged between "representatives' obligation to their own best judgment of the public good and their responsibility to the interests of the people."

During the debate on the Constitution, there was an attempt to tie the votes of representatives directly to the will of the people living in the district. (Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein tells this story the best in Why Societies Need Dissent.) The question was whether the Bill of Rights should contain a "right to instruct" representatives—a Constitutional guarantee that citizens could tell their elected officials exactly how to vote on particular pieces of legislation. Anti-federalists made this proposal as a way to restrict their representatives, to constrain the power of the federal government. It was also, to be sure, a more direct and complete fulfillment of the democratic promise of the revolution. After all, shouldn't politicians do what voters demand?

The country chose a different course, wisely so, according to Sunstein. Early American communities were isolated and extraordinarily homogenous. That insularity was a disadvantage. Decisions were made with limited information and without hearing different points of views. Moreover, like-minded groups were prone to grow more extreme in their views over time, increasing the chance that decisions made locally might be indefensibly severe.

Connecticut's Roger Sherman made the argument against the right to instruct amendment:

The words (of the right to instruct amendment) are calculated to mislead the people, by conveying an idea that they have a right to control the debates of the Legislature. This cannot be admitted to be just, because it would destroy the object of their meeting. I think, when the people have chosen a representative, it is his duty to meet others from the different parts of the Union, and consult, and agree with them on such acts as are for the general benefit of the whole community. If they were to be guided by instructions, there would be no use in deliberation.

The purpose of pulling people together from around a vast and quite diverse country was that you might actually learn something from a representative with a different point of view. Sunstein told me that one of the most profound insights of those who rejected the "right to instruct" was "to see heterogeneity as a creative force which would enable people not to hate each other but to think more productively what might be done to solve problems. It turned this vice into a virtue. I think that was the most important theoretical contribution the framers made. And at the best moments in our history, that's what's happened."

It would be a stretch to say this has been one of the country's "best moments." Congressional districts, even states, have grown more homogenous as people have sorted into like-minded communities. The advantages of deliberation Sherman recognized were lost in partisan rigidity long before the financial system needed bailing out.

The benefit of this crisis (and we're really scratching to find one) is that perhaps Congress will rediscover the use of diversity. That's a start. We'll worry about enabling "people not to hate each other" another day.

Thirty Years and Three Reasons Congress Imploded

When leaders of the House looked around for a consensus to confront what they were convinced was a national emergency, consensus had left the room.

There are plenty of stories about yesterday's tactical failings. But Monday's partisan collapse was also a product of at least three changes that have been taking place quietly for the past 30 years. All were underlying reasons for yesterday's disarray.

Reason No. 1: The Middle Has Gone Missing
Here's a chart compiled from vote tallies in Congress collected by political scientist Keith Poole (and others; here's their site). You can see that a sizable portion of Congress fell into the ideological middle from the end of World War II until sometime in the mid- to late-1970s. Then those who fell into the category of "moderate" began disappearing.

By 2005, only a smidgen of Congress could be described as moderate. By the time of the 110th Congress, Poole writes, "There is no overlap of the two political parties. They are completely separated ideologically."

In Congress, the time from 1948 until the late ‘60s "was the most bi-partisan period in the history of the modern Congress," according to a recent paper. Lots of moderates produced lots of bipartisanship. When House leaders over the weekend went looking for a middle place where they could build a bipartisan bill, there wasn't any middle to be found. There hadn't been a middle of any appreciable size for nearly 20 years.

Reason No. 2: Congressional Districts Have Grown Lopsided
Members of the House increasingly come from districts where one party or the other has an overwhelming advantage. Members of Congress don't have to be moderate because their constituency is overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic.

(Most journalists are convinced that gerrymandering is the prime cause of growing House district partisanship. It isn't. The evidence is pretty thick that districts are growing more lopsided because Americans are choosing to live among like-minded others, not because of legislative monkey business. Check out Alan Abramowitz's paper here. Keiko Ono comes to the same conclusion here. So does Bruce Oppenheimer at Vanderbilt, but there's no immediate link.)

Congressional districts have grown more partisan because of how Americans are moving and settling—because of the big sort. Many Americans now live in like-minded communities so isolated that they have little understanding (or sympathy) for those people and places with different opinions. Americans have become like the people of Babel, wrote congressional scholar Nelson Polsby. We live in the same place, but we speak different tongues. The trouble is, Polsby observed, "to undertake great public works it helps if everyone speaks the same language."

Members don't speak a common language because they represent communities that have been moving apart for the past three decades.

Reason No. 3: They Don't Live Here Anymore
Members of Congress used to live in the District of Columbia. They'd bring their spouses, and their kids would go to local schools. There was life outside the Capitol. Members would get together on weekends. They would meet at school plays, have drinks after work, eat breakfast on the weekends. Republican leader Robert Michel and Democrat Dan Rostenkowski would share a car on the drive back and forth between D.C. and Illinois.

Members don't live in Washington anymore. They fly in on Monday or Tuesday and are back in their districts as soon as the week's business is done. Now "the interaction that occurred over many decades between members, after hours ... and on weekends and with their spouses, simply does not occur anymore," said former Republican House member Vin Weber.

Members don't live in D.C. anymore because they are afraid to, and have been since at least 1990.

Rick Santorum, a young Pennsylvania conservative, ran against a seven-term incumbent that year. Santorum was losing to Doug Walgren until he started running a television commercial about the "strange" house the incumbent owned in Northern Virginia. It was "strange" because it wasn't in his district back in Pittsburgh but in "the wealthiest area of Virginia."

When Santorum unseated Walgren, the social life of Washington, D.C., changed. "Now you don't move your family to Washington," Weber told a conference at Princeton. "Now you live in sort of a dormitory with members of your own party." (After midterm losses in 2006, the homes of former Republican House members went up for sale at 129, 131, 132, 135, and 137 D St. Southeast. Talk about sorting!) The social glue created over coffee while sharing a Sunday newspaper is missing.

Congress works best when members have mixed relationships. If a person is simply an ideological opponent, it's easy to turn him into the enemy. But if your kids are in the same school play, that opponent is also a friend. Legislatures work most smoothly if they are slathered with some social grease.

Among some African peoples, it was against custom to marry within the tribe. Anthropologist Max Gluckman wrote about how these intertribe marriages created "cross-cutting" relationships among people. The marriage rules forced different tribes to interact, to know one another. Those mixed social ties reduced the chance of misunderstanding or war. The saying was, "They are our enemies; we marry them."

The simple need for mixed social relations is lost to Americans, who increasingly live in homogenous communities and attend like-minded churches.

It's apparently lost to Congress, too. We're living with the result.

Colorado Is Importing Democrats

Colorado is turning purple because of migration.

There have been other, longer explanations for why traditionally Republican Colorado is in play this election. Real Clear Politics has all the numbers. Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker has a good article on the ascendance of Democratic politicians in the state. Christopher Beam does the same fine job of parsing the politics of the state on Slate.

But migration tells a better story.

Colorado hasn't become what Stuart Rothenberg calls the most important state in November because of what politicians have or have not done or because of a new array of issues. Colorado has been trending Democratic because the people who have moved there largely come from Democratic counties in other states.

Colorado has imported Democrats.

Bob Cushing tracked the flow of people in and out of Colorado from 1981 to 2005 using migration data collected by the federal government. Some Colorado counties had a lot of flux in their populations. Others were relatively stable.

Cushing divided the state's 63 counties into three even groups based on migration. (OK, Colorado has 64 counties, but Broomfield is relatively new.) The 21 counties with the highest percentage of new population were the most Democratic in the 2004 election. They voted two percentage points more Democratic than the state as a whole. (These were the densely populated counties around Denver and Boulder.)

The middle group was eight percentage points more Republican than the Colorado average. And the last group of counties—those whose populations have been least affected by out-of-towners—voted 15 points more Republican than the state average.

The larger the number of newcomers in a Colorado county, the more Democratic that county voted in 2004.

This change has been taking place slowly, just like migration. But examined over a generation, the politics of the migration have shifted dramatically. The vote for the presidential elections from 1992 to 2004 in these 21 counties was 19 percentage points more Democratic than in the period from 1976 through 1988.

The in-between counties have grown 10 percentage points more Democratic.

The 23 Colorado counties least affected by the outside world have grown one percentage point more Republican.

And, yes, as expected, the people moving into the counties growing most Democratic come from counties that voted blue in presidential elections. The county outside of Colorado that sent the most people to the state over the last generation was deeply Democratic: Los Angeles.

When people move, they sort by political preference. It's happening all over the country. The new people moving into Northern Virginia are turning that area Democratic. Meanwhile, the county clerk in Crook County in rural central Oregon said that eight out of 10 people who registered with a party there since 1995 have been Republican.

Every four years there's a presidential election. But Americans vote with their feet every day.

In Politics, It's Not What They Say; It's What You Hear

All the back and forth about the truth or untruth of the latest campaign ad misses what’s really happening. It's not what people say that matters in today's politics. It's what people hear.

Voters go out of their way not to hear what upsets their existing beliefs. Fewer and fewer Republicans listened to the State of the Union addresses during the Clinton years. With Bush in office, Democrats have avoided the annual rite.

We listen selectively so that we hear what we want to hear. University of Kansas professor Diana Carlin has studied how Americans watch presidential debates. She found we rarely listen to help us make up our minds. We gather with like-minded others, and we listen to confirm our pre-existing beliefs. We don't look for enlightenment, only for confirmation.

This isn't exactly a new discovery. Francis Bacon wrote in Novum Organum (1620) that the "human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it." When Paul Lazarsfeld studied Erie County, Ohio, during the 1940 presidential election, he found that voters "somehow contrive to select out of the passing stream of stimuli those by which they are more inclined to be persuaded. ... So it is that the more they read and listen, the more convinced they become of the rightness of their own position."

This has nothing to do with ideology. Politics isn't about ideology. It's about joining a team, and we judge fairness as partisans. In 1951, Princeton and Dartmouth students watched a film of a football game and were asked to take note of foul play. Princeton stalwarts saw all the penalties that should have been called on the Dartmouth players. Dartmouth students were convinced the refs missed clips and offsides committed by the Princeton players.

We judge politics the same way—as team members, not truth-seekers. Last week the Washington Post reported on a slew of experiments showing that political misinformation feeds people's pre-existing beliefs. In one study, in fact, contrary information served to reinforce existing beliefs, not shake them. Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler gave Bush supporters a report showing that Iraq did not have WMDs at the time of the invasion. This information only increased Republicans' belief that Iraq had hidden or destroyed the weapons just before the attacks began. Hearing contrary information tends to reinforce existing beliefs, not shake them. (Their full paper is here.)

Paul Lazarsfeld in 1940 observed that Americans were preoccupied with the need for free and open avenues of discussion. A restricted flow of information wasn't democracy's most serious threat, Lazarsfeld wrote. A bigger impediment to democratic debate was having too many citizens who had already decided how they would vote. Because, Lazarsfeld noted, "we find that consumers of ideas, if they have made a decision on the issue, themselves erect high tariff walls against alien notions." What was the point of a presidential campaign if nobody was listening—if few people were able to hear what the other side was saying?

The political scientist was disturbed that half of Erie County's residents had picked their candidate soon after the parties' summer conventions. He felt that such a large number already committed to a candidate threatened to make a campaign pointless. That was 1940. In 2008, 90 percent of voters say they have already decided how they'll vote in November.

Rural Voters in Battleground States Love Palin, Back McCain

Rural voters in battleground states support John McCain by about the same percentage that they backed George Bush at this point in the 2004 election. In September 2004, Bush held a 13-point lead over John Kerry among rural voters in battleground states. This September, McCain holds a 10-point lead over Sen. Barack Obama.

Despite wars in two countries and a worldwide financial collapse, the 2008 election is static, locked in the divisions, rhetoric, and tactics of 2000 and 2004. The divide between rural and urban voters was among the most dramatic signs of geographic partisanship in 2004. George Bush came out of the nation's cities running 3.7 million votes behind John Kerry. He won rural counties by 4.1 million and then padded his margin in exurbia.

The poll of rural voters is just a bit more evidence that the talk about change and mavericks and a new kind of post-partisan politics is more than overheated. Americans are settling quite naturally into the voting patterns of the past two presidential elections.

The poll surveyed likely voters last week in 13 closely contested states. (They are Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New  Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.) Greenberg Quinlan Rosner interviewed 742 likely voters living in rural communities. The poll was commissioned by the Center for Rural Strategies, a nonpartisan rural-advocacy group in Whitesburg, Ky. (As editor of the Daily Yonder, I am an employee of Rural Strategies.)

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner works exclusively for Democratic candidates. Bill Greener, a Republican strategist, helped shape the poll. The full poll can be found here.

Rural voters were clearly enamored with the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin for the Republican ticket, even if they were less certain she was ready to take over the presidency. More than half said the choice of the Alaskan governor made them more likely to vote for McCain. Thirty-one percent said they were less likely to vote for McCain because of Palin.

Rural voters liked Gov. Palin personally more than they were impressed by her qualifications. Some 65 percent of those polled said the Alaskan "represents the values of rural communities." Fewer, 54 percent, said she was "ready to be vice president and assume the presidency if need be."

Rural voters have warmed considerably to McCain since the spring. When asked who would do a "better job" on a range of issues, rural voters were increasingly likely to name McCain.

For example, in May rural voters thought Obama would do a better job than McCain on the nation's economy by a 44 percent to 36 percent margin. In this poll, however, rural voters now say McCain would do better with the economy by a 46 percent to 43 percent margin.

In September, Obama held a 10-point edge over McCain on the question of who would do a better job of "bringing the right kind of change." Now the two candidates are tied.

McCain moved up on every question—who is "on your side," who shares your values, who would do better in Iraq—while Obama lost ground or stayed the same since the May survey.

Fifty-three percent of those polled said their neighbors and their communities were "ready for a black president." Twenty-four percent said their neighbors and the people of their communities were not ready for a black president. A quite large number, 23 percent, answered this question by saying they didn't know, refused to answer, or that neither option was appropriate.

The poll was taken during the economic turmoil of last week, and rural voters named the "economy and jobs" as the most pressing issues facing them. When asked to compare the importance of the economy and values, 61 percent of those polled said the economy was the "most important thing" in the election. Only 36 percent said it was most important that the next president "reflects my values."

Pollster Anna Greenberg said she was surprised McCain's lead wasn't larger. She said the sample in this poll was slightly more Republican than the rural poll taken in May. And although rural voters were seeing McCain more favorably, that was not translating into decisions to vote for the Republican.

Republican Greener interpreted the poll as more evidence that Democrats have been unable to cross the cultural division that has been defined by the geography of rural and urban America. "When Sen. Obama says that people living in small towns cling to their guns and religion due to bitterness, or his supporters attack Gov. Palin for not being qualified to serve by making light of her background as the mayor of a small city, this all contributes to separating the Democrats from voters in rural areas," Greener said.

Democrats have told themselves that they were able to win U.S. Senate seats in Montana, Missouri, and Virginia in 2006 because they put up candidates who could attract votes in rural areas. (Missouri's Claire McCaskill, Virginia's Jim Webb, and Jon Tester from Montana were nicknamed the "redneck caucus.") When you look at the county-by-county results, however, these races were won because Democrats increased their turnout in the cities.

Obama has been hustling in rural places, but this poll shows that over the past four months, rural voters in swing states have not moved his way. They have, however, found more to like in John McCain.

George Bush won in 2004 because he was able to turn out voters in rural and exurban communities. The tactical question this year may be whether Obama can pull the same trick in the cities.

Will Rural Voters Make It Three in a Row for Republicans?

Rural and exurban voters made George Bush president—twice.

You can see that in the chart below. It simply counts the vote in rural, exurban, and urban counties and subtracts the John Kerry totals from the Bush totals. Kerry won the nation's metro areas by about 3.7 million votes. He lost rural counties by more than 4.1 million.

Kerry won nearly 52 percent in urban areas, where 73 percent of the voters lived in 2004. The Democrat failed to crack 40 percent in rural and exurban counties, which had 27 percent of the vote.

The same was true in 2000. Gore won the cities. He lost the countryside.

And that is why Barack Obama is spending quality time in places like Lebanon, Va., and Grand Junction, Colo.

We'll know better Monday morning how rural voters are sizing up this election when we report the findings of a poll from 13 battleground states. At this point in the 2004 campaign, Bush was up over Kerry by 13 points in rural areas. Stay tuned here for this year's comparison.

Thirty years ago, there was no Republican advantage in rural America. In fact, the average population of a county that voted Democratic in the 1976 election (for Jimmy Carter) was slightly smaller than the average Republican county. Over the next two generations, however, people made choices about how and where they wanted to live. We sorted. Some people gravitated to cities. Others moved to where there was a bit more space. The two political parties came to represent people who had a kind of lifestyle that was represented in where they lived.

By the time this century rolled around, the differences were astounding. Political scientist Michael Harrington compared blue and red counties by their population density. In 2000, Gore counties, on average, had 739 people per square mile. In 2004, Kerry counties had 836 people per square mile. Bush counties averaged 108 people per square mile in 2000 and 110 four years later.

Again, we don't think people who voted Democratic moved to cities to be around other Democrats. There are some people who enjoy an urban lifestyle, and those ways of life line up with Democratic presidential candidates. People who headed the other direction tended to vote Republican.

At a party of Republicans in the exurban town of Savage, outside Minneapolis, a man talked to me about the "places you go [in the city] where there are a lot of gray, pasty-faced people. I like it here." One of Bush's campaign leaders in the county told me, "A lot of us are fed up with the urban lifestyle. I would not want to see my grandchildren raised in downtown Minneapolis in an environment that is different from the one out here. I want to split my own wood and be less dependent on government."

There you are. Two Americas, defined by the size of government, population density, and wood-splitting. And that difference is determining presidential elections.

"It is hard to overstate the historical significance of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections," writes Seth McKee, a young political scientist who has done the most work on the rural vote. "Despite the decline in the rural percentage of the American electorate, the rural vote has become more important because it is so decidedly Republican. Never before has the gap in presidential vote choice of rural and urban voters been so wide."

In May, we conducted a poll of rural voters in 13 battleground states. John McCain led Obama by 9 points. (McCain and Hillary Clinton were tied.) In May 2004, George Bush led John Kerry by 9 points. (These rural polls are conducted by the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, with help from Republican consultant Bill Greener.)

Four years ago in September, George Bush was leading by 13 points with this key group. Monday, we'll have new results.

Elections Change, but Geography Remains the Same

Americans aren't moving to be around others who agree about single-payer health plans or the proper response to a nuclear Iran. We seek out comfort among people who live like we do, think like we do, act like we do. On Election Day, we tend to vote like our neighbors, and so it looks like we have sorted ourselves intentionally into Republican and Democratic enclaves, but those divisions are more about lifestyle than policy.

That's why the primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was just as geographically polarized as the contest between John Kerry and George Bush. In 2004, half the voters in that very close election lived in a county where either Kerry or Bush won by more than 20 percentage points. In the dead-even 2008 primary, exactly half the voters lived in counties where Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton won by a landslide.

Democrats in '08 were evenly split along the same geographic lines as those that evenly split Republicans and Democrats in 2004. The better George Bush did in a county, the more votes Hillary Clinton won. The map of voting results by county in Missouri from the 2004 general election looks exactly like the map from the 2008 Democratic primary. Obama won the Kerry counties; Clinton and Bush won the rest.

 The race between ideological opposites in 2004 had the same geographic divisions as the race between Obama and Clinton, who are ideological twins.

When this phenomenon was first discovered early in the primary season, there was a brief behind-the-scenes debate. The Clinton people thought this was proof that their candidate would be able to pull Republican votes in the fall. The Obama camp dismissed the comparison. You can't extrapolate primary results to the general election, they said. Two different kettles of fish.

The Clinton people looked at these results and began to change the campaign's itineraries. For the next several months, Bill Clinton spent most of his afternoons speaking from the back of a pick-up parked in the courthouse square of some red county. Obama, meanwhile, rolled up big leads in the cities. (He won the southern metro areas by the same margins that Hillary Clinton took Appalachia, though we didn't hear much complaining or surprise about those lopsided victories.)

The primary ended with the Democratic Party just as divided as the nation was in '04 and in exactly the same way.

Sen. Obama is stuck. He didn't find a way across the boundaries of lifestyle and culture that split Democrats. And now it's the middle of September, and he still is trying to find a way to bring these very different Americas together. (It might be that there isn't one.)

John McCain may have come to another conclusion: that he doesn't need to widen his net and can win by turning out the same voters who elected Bush. More on that shortly.

2008 Is Now a Big Sort Election

Five thousand Mormons have moved out of downtown Salt Lake City in the last five years. They haven't left the SLC metro area, according to a July story in the Salt Lake Tribune. They've left the city. The Mormon population is "shifting north, south and west" out of Salt Lake City, wrote Peggy Fletcher Stack. And as Mormons move to the suburbs, "downtown Salt Lake City has grown more religiously diverse—and often more attractive to outsiders."

Mormon families who have exited downtown SLC have clustered. Eight out of 10 residents from one of these developments are Mormon, according to Stack. "There are 28 children under 12 within nine houses on our cul de sac," one Mormon mother, an urban refugee, told the reporter. "We are all stay-at-home moms and all Mormons. It's great."

Mormons load up house and hound in Mayflower trucks and U-Hauls and move out to developments with uplifting names like Daybreak and Bountiful. A more "diverse" group takes their place downtown. Over time, the city grows more liberal—the last two SLC mayors have been left-leaning Dems—and the suburbs become more Republican.

Welcome to the big sort—the social, cultural and economic phenomenon that has now taken the reins of the 2008 election and steered it back into the (depressing and divisive) pattern of 2000 and 2004.

Most U.S. communities have grown increasingly Republican or Democratic over the past 30 years. The numbers are clear-cut. Bob Cushing (the stats powerhouse in this operation) studied voting patterns at the county level in presidential elections since 1948. He found that since 1976, the trend has been for Republicans and Democrats to grow more geographically segregated. In the contest between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, about a quarter of voters lived in a county where a candidate won by more than 20 percentage points.

The last five presidential elections have been closer than any comparable period in the last century. At the same time, an increasing number of communities have developed overwhelming, and stable, local majorities. In 1992, Cushing found, 37.7 percent of American voters lived in counties where the margin was greater than 20 points. By 2000, it was 45.3 percent. The 2004 vote between John Kerry and George Bush was one of the closest in history nationally, but where people lived, the election wasn't close at all. In six out of 10 U.S. counties, the margin (for one party or the other) was 20 percentage points or more. And nearly half of all voters lived in a community where the local results were a landslide.

Bob Cushing and I thought that a good deal of this political segregation was created by migration. The entire country was sorting—in the same way Salt Lake City was sorting. If this were true, Cushing figured a community that tipped Republican or Democratic would keep tipping as it collected more like-minded residents.

That's exactly what he found. Once counties grew solidly Democratic or Republican, the local margins would increase in presidential votes. One half of U.S. voters live in counties that have remained unchanged in their presidential preference since 1980; 60 percent live in counties that haven't changed since 1988; and nearly 73 percent live in counties that haven't changed since 1992.

One early objection to our findings was that people didn't check local voting records before they moved. That is largely true. People didn't want neighbors who had the same opinion about single-payer health plans. They wanted to be around people who lived like they did. Who thought the way they thought. Who had the same kind of lifestyle.

And these days, lifestyle predicts political party.

When asked to explain how people choose a political party, Donald Green at Yale described two social events. Imagine you are walking down a hall, Green said. There are two doors leading to two different social gatherings. You look in at both, and then you ask yourself some questions. "Which one is filled with people that you most closely identify with?" Green asked. "Which ones would you like to have your sons and daughters marry?" You don't pick your party by position paper. You get a vibe. You pick the group with your kind of people. And you join—and, most likely, you join for life.

That's the way we've chosen where and how we live. Opposites don't attract. Psychologists know that people seek out others like themselves for marriage and friendship. That the same phenomenon could be taking place between people and communities isn't all that surprising to social psychologists. "Mobility enables the sociological equivalent of ‘assortative mating,' " social psychologist David Myers explained. At the same time, the social insularity created in these increasingly homogenous communities, churches, and clubs reinforces political partisanship. We hear and believe what our group hears and believes. Dissent is squelched, extremism is rewarded and allegiance to the group is enforced.

So, despite all promises and predictions of a new kind of post-partisan politics, this election has been jimmied back into the pattern of 2000 and '04. Really, who should be surprised? Elections are a reflection of how and where we live.