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My earlier posts highlighted the great cultural/identity rift that divides the U.S. into two mutually antagonistic and isolated tribes. As pointed out in the first post in this series, this divide is reflected in and amplified by our politics. The chart below shows how the distance between Democrats and Republicans (in terms of political values) has increased between 1994 and 2014 and how the areas of overlap (purple areas) has shrunk in the same period.
This growing divide can also be measured by examining support for tax cuts. In 1986, 176 House Democrats supported Reagan’s tax reform bill, which wouldn’t have passed without Democratic support. In 2001 only 28 Democrats supported Bush’s tax cut (that support was needed to pass the bill). And in 2017, there were no Democratic House votes in support of Trump’s tax cut bill (which passed anyway).
How did we get here?
Our politics has become more divided because of two recent trends, one restricting democracy and one expanding it. The first, the increasing use of gerrymandering, reflects a growing anti-democratic trend to move away from the “one person, one vote” standard. The second, the increase use of primary elections to choose a party’s candidate, is an example of the dangers of increasing democracy and devaluing the roles of traditional pols.
There has always been gerrymandering. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines “gerrymandering as “in U.S. politics, the practice of drawing the boundaries of electoral districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage over its rivals (political or partisan gerrymandering) or that dilutes the voting power of members of ethnic or linguistic minority groups (racial gerrymandering).” This practice stems from the early 19th century, as is shown in the cartoon below from 1812.
The Supreme Court has found racial gerrymandering to be incompatible with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but has most often found political gerrymandering to be acceptable because it could not find any “judicially discernible and manageable standards for adjudicating political gerrymandering claims.” In June 2019, The Supreme Court in RUCHO ET.AL, v. COMMON CAUSE ET AL ruled that federal courts are powerless to hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering, saying that “We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” In fact, the Supreme Court has been very inconsistent on this issue, declaring in 1962 in WESTBERRY V, SANDERS that congressional electoral districts must be drawn in such a way that, as nearly as is practicable, one man’s vote in a congressional election is worth as much as another’s. But, in the end, the court decided that this was a political issue not a judicial one, and that relief can be found in the ballot boxes, not the courts.
Has Gerrymandering gotten worse? Perhaps the question should be “worse than what?” According to The Center for American Progress, gerrymandering in 2010 led to an increase in 39 U.S. House seats for the Republicans and 20 seats for the Democrats beyond what a “fair” apportionment would result in (see figure below).
Why is this divisive? According to the libertarian Mercartus Center, “Where gerrymandering is effective, it increases the electoral value of a political candidate’s appeal to a plurality within his or her own party, while decreasing incentives to accommodate the viewpoints of independent or opposition-party voters. There is strong evidence for one of gerrymandering’s expected polarizing effects, specifically the rendering of intra-party primaries more competitive relative to general elections.” The effect here is to skew political parties toward their bases, thus shifting their views away from the polity as a whole.
Party Primaries: Is too much democracy a bad thing?
This month, an article in The Atlantic argued just that: too much democracy is a bad thing. Jonathan Rauch and Ray la Raja wrote “Americans who tuned in to the first Democratic presidential debates this summer beheld a spectacle that would have struck earlier generations as ludicrous. A self-help guru and a tech executive, both of them unqualified and implausible as national candidates, shared the platform with governors, senators, and a former vice president.” Rauch and la Raja were discussing the Presidential nominating process which has been distilled to a series of state primaries. The old system, where candidates were chosen by the party establishment (based on a combination of political orthodoxy and hard-headed vote calculation), was more or less cast out in 1968 when Hubert Humphrey won the nomination despite never running in a primary.
New research by the political scientists Byron Shafer and Regina Wagner considers the effects of traditional state-party organizations, with their focus on transactional politics, being displaced by a “volunteer” model.
When party insiders evaluate candidates, they think about appealing to overworked laborers, harried parents, struggling students, less politicized moderates, and others who do not show up on primary day—but whose support the party will need to win the general election and then to govern. Reducing the influence of party professionals has, as Shafer and Wagner observe, amplified the voices of ideological activists at the expense of rank-and-file voters. Political theorists sometimes refer to the gap between primary voters and the larger electorate as the problem of “unrepresentative participation.” Whatever you call it, it has a perverse consequence. As Henry Jones Ford predicted, rather than disenfranchising political elites, primaries shift power from one set of elites (insiders who serve the party organizations) to another set (ideologues and interest groups with their own agendas), thus making our politics more divisive.
Equally insidious is the trend to “primary” an incumbent who is seen to be ideologically impure. In the past incumbents were very difficult to beat because of their advantages in money, organization and name recognition. But the rise of the Tea Party on the right and a progressive movement on the left, has led to increased attempts to create ideological unity in each party through the primary process. In 2008, the Tea Party supported Scott Brown (MA), Marco Rubio (FL), Rand Paul (KY), Nicki Haley (SC), and Mike Lee (UT) who all beat establishment candidates in the primary and went on to win the general election. The Tea party has since crested as a political movement; nevertheless, its impact on party purity remains. While the Democrats have been late to the game, the most startling result in 2018 was the defeat of ten term incumbent Joe Crowley by a young Democratic-Socialist political neophyte, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, setting off an ideological battle between the left and moderate wings of the Democratic Party.
One of the consequences of the increase in primarying incumbents has been the increase in resignations. As can be seen from the figure below, the number of resignations per election of Republican house members and senators has been increasing since the George Herbert Walker Bush administration. There are a number of reasons for this increase –members are getting older, serving in the House as a member of the minority is not very satisfying especially under Donald Trump, but surely one reason has to be the way in which the Republican Party is purging the ideologically impure. In 2020, 24 Republican House members and 3 Republican Senators have already retired or indicated that they are retiring.
Our next post will examine another factor that has made our politics so divided –money.
Voter apathy is one reason that primarying is so effective. Typically primary elections do not draw many voters, compared with general elections. For this reason, a well funded an organized primary campaign can overthrow an incumbent. One of the interesting things about the Trump administration is that they make little effort to try accommodate the interests of any group outside their base which appears to represent 35-40 percent of the voters. Whether this approach will be an effective reelection strategy remains to be seen? The ability to demonize one’s opponent seems to be a key to election, and that brings us back to money to fund a massive attack operation against the opponent.