The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between April 24th and 27th of a nationwide sample of 1,836 adults (including 1,647 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.2 points for adults and 3.0 points for registered voters.
If you’re trying to guess whether people are Republicans or Democrats, knowing a few basic facts about them will take you a long way. What’s their race and gender? How far did they get in school? What part of the country do they live in and is their community urban, suburban or rural?
Between 2016 and 2020, for example, white Americans without college degrees favored the Republican Party by nearly 24 percentage points. Strike up a conversation about politics with such a person in rural central Maine, near where I live, and chances are that his or her sympathies will lie with the G.O.P.
Or consider gender and attitudes about crime and public safety: Men are about 10 percentage points more supportive than women of the death penalty and 10 percentage points less supportive of gun control. Or how about ethnicity and views on illegal immigration? Relative to Latino Americans, non-Latinos endorse“increasing deportation” as a partial solution by a 22-point margin.
Although there are certainly people whose politics defy generalization, the underlying demographic tendencies are powerful predictors of belief — powerful enough that elections have become as much a turnout game as an exercise in persuasion.
But this raises an important question. If our political views and behavior can be so easily predicted by characteristics like race (over which we have no control) or by factors like education (where our choices may be highly constrained by other things such as the social class of our parents), then when it comes to politics, are any of us really thinking for ourselves?
The accusation that people on the other side of the political divide have abandoned critical thinking and moral reasoning is now commonplace in American political discourse. Many on the left interpret the political tendencies of white voters without college educations as evidence that the Republican Party’s core constituency is ill informed or even unintelligent. Who else could fall for the lies of Donald Trump? Republicans, for their part, regularly invoke the idea of “liberal groupthink,” using it to make sense of how some of America’s ostensibly brightest minds could champion simplistic, unworkable policies like defunding the police.
These accusations form part of the broader phenomenon of partisan stereotyping, which has flourished as the country has pulled apart. Alongside the charge that those in the opposite political camp don’t think for themselves, Democrats in 2022 were considerably more likely than they were in 2016 to say that Republicans were closed-minded, dishonest and immoral. Republicans felt pretty much the same way about Democrats. . . .
It may be inevitable that our group identities, interests and experiences shape our political inclinations. But it’s up to each of us to scrutinize the beliefs we’ve absorbed from our social milieu to ensure that our values and political commitments are what we truly think they should be — that our beliefs are based on sound reasons rather than brute social forces.
Regrettably, a hyperpartisan society does little to reward such independence of thought, even as both progressives and conservatives claim its mantle. . . .
By all means, let’s duke it out in the public sphere and at the ballot box. You’ll fight for your interests and values, I’ll fight for mine. That’s democracy in a big, diverse, boisterous nation. But if we could bear in mind that we sometimes stumble into our most passionately held beliefs, the tenor of our discourse might be a bit saner and more cordial. The fact that we are all deeply social creatures, in politics and otherwise, underscores our shared humanity — something that we would be wise to never lose sight of.
NOTE - Click on an image to get a larger version to view.
The charts above are from a survey done by the Pew Research Center between June 27th and July 4th of a nationwide sample of 6,174 adults, with a 1.8 point margin of error.
Consider the following. It is part of a guest essay in The New York Times by John Lawrence:
There is nothing wrong with reaching across the aisle to seek common ground.
But insisting on bipartisanship — given the major policy divide between the parties on economic recovery, tax reform, climate change and health care — usually guarantees gridlock (which promotes voter cynicism) or actions that are watered down and ineffective (which are condemned by everyone, right and left).
There is nothing wrong with being partisan. . . .
In the decades after World War II, bipartisan policymaking became the norm because the ideological divisions within both parties — for example, there were numerous liberal Republicans who, since Reconstruction, supported civil rights — compelled cross-party alliances. Most issues did not break down ideologically by party. In fact, for much of the 20th century, supporters of political reform, environmentalism and civil rights could be found as easily in the Republican as in the Democratic Party.
A sizable cohort of moderate to liberal Republicans like Jacob Javits, Clifford Case and Mark Hatfield provided the votes to pass progressive legislation. Similarly, during periods of conservative activism, Republicans could reach across the aisle to find conservative Democrats (like “boll weevils”) to help pass their priorities.
But those circumstances no longer exist, and as a result, bipartisanship has become the Sasquatch of American politics: rarely seen but fervently sought. The opportunities for finding cross-party support for significant legislation, except in response to a national calamity, like the Troubled Asset Relief Program for the financial crisis, have evaporated. The parties have fundamentally changed — there are now very few liberal Republicans or conservative Democrats — and that transformation has hollowed out the middle ground of American politics. Continuing to demand bipartisanship as the validator of sound policy is not only fanciful but also self-defeating. . . .
In the past half-century, the parties have become far more ideologically unified and distinct. In a 2014 report, Pew Research found that a persuadable middle — moderate to liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats — in Congress shrank from 240 representatives and 29 senators in the 1970s to nine and three, respectively, 20 years later to none in 2014. Members of Congress voted with their party leadership 60 percent of the time just a few decades ago but now vote well over 90 percent along party lines, and even more so when voting on major policy issues.
Seeking bipartisanship looks more and more like a fool’s errand. President Barack Obama offered significant concessions to Republicans in hopes of attracting their support on legislation like the 2009 stimulus and the Affordable Care Act, but he came up almost totally empty-handed. Many Democrats were furious that their broader designs — especially on health care — had been trimmed to attract nonexistent Republican support. The consequences of this caution are still with us.
The aspect of political divisiveness that we can do something about — and that exacerbates the partisanship we probably cannot completely undo, at least for a while — is the incendiary rhetorical overkill of political debate. . . .
Our ideologically segregated parties should use political power to accomplish objectives promised in campaigns and then let voters decide if the party has earned the right to govern. True, this approach could result in sweeping policy changes, but voters would then have clarity about whom to hold responsible for governing successes and failures.
The charts above are from the Pew Research Center. They show that Americans see the partisanship in our government as growing, and that concerns about four out of five of them. They want Congress and the executive to work together and compromise for the good of the country. Partisanship may feel good to those engaging in it, but it doesn't solve the nation's problems.
