Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald
As Americans prepare to vote in midterm elections Nov. 8, why does American politics seem so rigid today? Part of the reason is the long-standing trend in partisan polarization.
According to an American National Election Studies (ANES) Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behaviour survey released Aug. 16, 2021, in the fall of 2020, 90 per cent of Americans said there were important differences in what the parties stood for -- the highest number recorded by the ANES in almost 70 years.
Voters are increasingly tied to their political loyalties and values. They have become less likely to change their basic political evaluations or vote for the other party’s candidate.
Landslide victories in presidential elections are a thing of the past. There were no blue or red states back then. In 1972, Richard Nixon carried 49 states, as did Ronald Reagan in 1984. This would be unthinkable today.
Why is this happening? It is rooted in divides between the parties on issues tied to racial, ethnic, national and religious identities. These issues, ones that Americans consider very important, tend to exacerbate, not mitigate, their differences.
Paradoxically, this co-exists with frequent changes in who controls the government, because of the increasing parity in the two parties’ electoral strength. You can see this partisan parity in the national electorate.
By 2020, the Democratic advantage over Republicans in party identification was just four percentage points, the smallest in seven decades, according to the same ANES survey. Partisan parity is visible in Congress as well, where the parties can expect to compete for control in most elections.
When control of government is always within reach, there is less need for the losing party to adapt and recalibrate. And so if it stays on the same path, voters have little reason to revise their political loyalties.
Therefore even major events like the coronavirus pandemic and George Floyd’s murder in 2020 did not disrupt partisan alignments in that fall election. Instead, those events were subsumed into the existing axis of partisan conflict.
This was evident in the outcome. True, the changes between 2016 and 2020 were enough to help Joe Biden beat incumbent Donald Trump. But those changes were small by historical standards.
In fact the 2020 election continued partisan polarization: People saw Donald Trump as more conservative than he was perceived in 2016 and saw Biden as more liberal than they viewed Hillary Clinton in 2016. And Democratic and Republican voters were even further apart on important issues.
Given this situation, a shift of even a few percentage points can matter. And this increases the incentive for people to countenance their own party’s undemocratic behavior in order to win an election.
So now we see a majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for Congress and key statewide offices -- 299 in all -- who have or denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election, according to an Oct. 6 Washington Post analysis.
As Milan W. Svolik, a professor of political science at Yale University, noted his article “Polarization Versus Democracy” in the July 2019 issue of the Journal of Democracy, “Survey experiments in several countries suggest that many voters are willing to put their partisan interests above democratic principles -- a finding that may be key to understanding democratic backsliding.”
Should this pattern of behaviour continue to become more pronounced, American democracy will be in even bigger trouble than it is now.
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