Divided America?
By Ralph Reed
As the nation enters the home stretch of the 2004 Presidential election, the campaign appears to be headed for a photo finish. The press and pundits tell us that the nation is divided into “blue” states and “red” states, churchgoers and secular voters, rural and urban, culturally conservative gun-owners and chablis-sipping cosmopolitans.
Compared to the politics of the pre-Civil War period, the New Deal, or the Vietnam era, today’s politics pale by comparison. So why do we seem so divided? And why are we bracing for such a close election?
The reasons are complex. First, the two major political parties have not been at such parity in 120 years. Over the past decade we have witnessed what no one alive today had ever seen before: three Presidential elections in a row (1992, 1996, 2000) in which neither party’s nominee won more than 50 percent of the vote. The same parity is found in Congressional contests. In 1996, 1998, and 2000, the margin between the two parties in the total national vote was 1 percent or less. The last time the parties were so close to a tie was when Grover Cleveland won the Presidency in 1884, lost it narrowly in 1888, and then won it again in 1892. It was a rare interruption of Republican dominance that stretched from the Civil War until Teddy Roosevelt bolted from the party in 1912 to lead the Progressive Party, thereby contributing to the election of Woodrow Wilson.
In this sense, American politics today resembles a civic version of the National Football League—fundraising equality and aggressive candidate recruitment efforts mimic free agency and salary caps that keep the teams evenly matched. Just as the Super Bowl, once a blow-out, is now more often decided by a last-minute field goal, national politics has gone from Reagan-era landslides to heart-stopping finishes.
Reinforcing this trend is the fact that the political parties have come to reflect fairly accurately the ideological cleavages within the electorate. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney represent a conservative governing philosophy. John Kerry and John Edwards are their polar opposites. This fact is reflected in the ratings of the Americans for Democratic Action, founded in 1947 by disenchanted New Deal Democrats, which are considered the gold standard in the liberal bona fides of elected officials. John Kerry’s lifetime ADA score is 92, compared to 90 for Walter Mondale; John Edwards’ lifetime ADA rating is 81, compared to 79 for Geraldine Ferraro, the Vice Presidential nominee in 1984.
In his 1956 acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention, Adlai Stevenson said to Southerners at the height of massive resistance: “Of course there is disagreement in the Democratic Party on desegregation. It could not be otherwise in the only party that must speak responsibly and responsively in both the North and the South.” Stevenson boasted that the fact that neither side was satisfied with the party platform on the “explosive subject” of race relations was proof that Democrats had “contributed to our national unity as only a national Party can.” It is hard to imagine a party embracing so broad a philosophical divide today. Pro-lifers of both parties have gradually drifted to the Republicans, environmentalists and personal injury trial lawyers to the Democrats.
The transformation of American parties into analogues of their ideologically driven European counterparts has the effect of mobilizing voters by philosophical affinity rather than partisan affiliation. It thus exaggerates differences where political parties of the nineteenth century tended to mute or obscure them.
The triumph of ideology has caused regional permutations in party support that create the impression of the existence of two nations within a nation, one blue, the other red. The party that nominated Adlai Stevenson 48 years ago exists in name only. In 2000, the Democrats carried not a single state in the South, even with a Tennessean at the top of the ticket. And with the obvious exception of Florida, the Kerry-Edwards ticket is not competitive in most of the South. If Kerry fails to carry a single state in the region, Bush will win the South with 14 states and a total of 173 electoral votes. The result will be that Kerry would have to win 74 percent of all the remaining electoral votes to be elected President. The Democratic Party, in Senator Zell Miller’s phrase, is a “national party no more.”
Another factor in the current polarization is the splintering of the media universe, which has created a fractured civic discourse. In 1980, 90 percent of all the television sets turned on in prime-time hours were tuned to the three major broadcast networks of CBS, NBC, and ABC. Today that figure is 50 percent and falling. The rise of cable television, talk radio, and the Internet has created two parallel media universes where conservatives and liberals seek their news and reinforce their beliefs. These media echo chambers energize their participants but also tend to exaggerate differences. Conservatives gravitate to FOX News and favorite Internet sites like Drudge or NationalReview.com. Liberals flock to the New York Times, CNN, and MoveOn.org.
We are no longer a nation that reads the same newspapers and watches the same evening news broadcast. Lyndon Johnson famously said during the Vietnam War, “If we’ve lost Walter Cronkite, we’ve lost the country.” It is doubtful that a President of either party would say the same about a network news anchor today. According to Voter News Service exit poll data, in 2000 an estimated 30 percent of all voters got the bulk of their information about the candidates from the Internet. There is much that is positive about this development—the ability to bypass opinion gatekeepers, a return to grass roots politics, and a renewed emphasis on face-to-face campaigning, whether signified by the Dean “meet-ups” or the Bush campaign’s “Parties for the President.” But the downside is that most of the information we receive is narrow-cast rather than broadcast, and we rarely gather as a single people around the television set to view the same show, whether “I Love Lucy” or the national conventions. Politics has gone cable.
While these phenomena—party parity, the triumph of ideology, and a disaggregated media universe—may be new to us, they are as old as the republic itself. Thomas Jefferson endured a vicious, partisan press, and Lincoln saw his Whig party splinter into anti-slavery Republicans and popular sovereignty Democrats.
It is much too easy to overstate the current polarity. The United States is not Bosnia. Indeed, there is much evidence to suggest that, on the large and consequential issues, the American people have arrived at something roughly resembling consensus. In both public opinion surveys and election results, Americans generally express themselves in favor of lower taxes, welfare reform, a strong military, an aggressive posture in the war against terrorism, the right to own a gun, and preserving marriage as an institution between a man and a woman.
This consensus is reflected on Capitol Hill. It is easy in the heat of the political season (and John Kerry’s equivocation on Iraq) to forget how remarkably bipartisan the support for the military action in Iraq was at the time. The resolution authorizing the President to go into Iraq passed 77-23 in the U.S. Senate and 296-133 in the House. These are margins large enough to pass an amendment to the Constitution. It was supported by then-House Minority leader Dick Gephardt, Senator Hillary Clinton, and every leading Democratic Presidential aspirant, including 2000 Vice Presidential nominee Senator Joe Lieberman.
The same bipartisan spirit prevailed in the passage of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind education initiative, which passed the Senate led by its chief cosponsor Ted Kennedy, with only ten dissenting votes. Even George W. Bush’s first round of tax cuts passed with the support of 12 Democrats in the Senate and 28 Democrats in the House.
President Bush is in a strong position by historic standards in spite of the apparent polarity. In an August Gallup poll, 51 percent of the voters approved of the job President Bush was doing, only one percentage point off Clinton’s 52 percent job approval in the summer of 1996. No incumbent President with a job approval of 50 percent or higher has failed to be re-elected in the modern era. And in a close election, Bush’s 89 percent job approval among Republicans—higher than Reagan’s 85 percent in 1984—bodes well for turning out his strongest supporters to the polls.
Some compare President George W. Bush with his father in 1992. They point to a war in the Persian Gulf, an economy recovering from recession, and an incumbent President with approval below 50 percent in many polls. But the comparison breaks down in many crucial respects. George H. W. Bush’s job approval rating in 1992 fell to as low as 37 percent and never rose above 50 percent during the entire campaign. Bush 41 also faced a primary challenge from the Right in the form of Pat Buchanan, forcing the incumbent to spend time and resources healing an intra-party rift. Like Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton, Bush 43 has a united party and no primary challenge. Finally, the presence of Ross Perot might very well have robbed Bush 41 of victory, since Perot pulled votes from Bush’s natural base.
While there is much about the polarizing politics of our time that is nasty and disconcerting, there is also much that is encouraging. For 2004 will be a big election about the big issues: how to win the war on terror, how to create jobs and economic security in a competitive and global economy, and how to strengthen families and communities in a time of dramatic social change. In a sturdy democracy, a vibrant and hard-fought campaign about important issues is never unhealthy and may make us stronger as a nation, even if we do occasionally raise our voices.
Ralph Reed is president of Century Strategies, a public affairs firm in Atlanta, and chairman of Bush-Cheney ’04 for the Southeast region.
