Rob, my friend and brother-in-law, recently said this to me while we were discussing the aftermath of the election:
I think I’ve gotten too polarized while simultaneously complaining about the polarization of our society.
What’s interesting to me about this is that my response to it was very different than it would have been just two weeks ago. When I was in college getting my undergrad in PoliSci, I studied a book entitled Culture Wars by Morris Fiorina and Jeremy Pope. In it, the authors explained that though the media likes to display America as growing increasingly polarized, the statistics don’t show that. In general, the American voter population follows a bell curve along the political spectrum with most of us falling in the center (moderate). I always used this as a response whenever Rob, or anyone else, would complain about the polarization of America.
After this recent election, and in preparation for this post, I wanted to take a look at what Fiorina says today, since the edition of that book that I read was from 2004. Fortunately, he penned a piece on this exact topic for the Washington Post in 2014. He says the same thing, in effect: Americans are not more polarized, they are simply sorted that way in the natural dichotomy of a two-party system. Okay, great, that’s what the numbers show, and the numbers can’t lie or be misleading. They’re numbers.
However, there is something very important here that Fiorina mentions, and that’s the concept of “sorting.” He explains that the problem with the Pew poll is that by offering clear-cut and extreme question responses, a moderately liberal participant and a heavily liberal participant would answer the same way, which would be the liberal response. Thus, after a series of these questions, it’s conceivable and likely that moderately liberal people may have lumped themselves into the same category as the extreme left-wingers. This, again, seems logical and sensical. We’re not more polarized, and polls which suggest that we are simply don’t show our centrality because they offer a polarized question.
What Fiorina seems to overlook, though, is that there is no effective difference here. Why? Because on election day, we aren’t presented a spectrum of options from which to choose, we’re presented with two: the conservative Republican or the liberal Democrat.
I don’t want to suggest that I think the two-party system is a bad thing, because I don’t. It’s easy for people to lash out at it for its polarizing (sorting) effect on politics, but two-party systems actually help to moderate the involved parties heavily as they can’t stray too far one way or another and still maintain power. I’ll likely do a whole post about this at some point, but not here.
So, assuming the reality of a two-party system, it really doesn’t matter how non-polarized the electorate is on election day, because the choice is either A or B.
Hence why we are, in fact, polarized in the sense that half of America wants one thing (Republicans) and the other half wants another (Democrats) regardless of how fiercely any individual voter is devoted to that side of the spectrum. Polarized or sorted, the effect is the same.
Here is where I will probably lose some of you: Trump’s victory is not a direct result of this political polarization. In fact, it is because of how polarized his supports perceive America to be that they nominated him in the first place. To the majority of his supporters, Trump is seen as “the candidate that can shake up Washington.” This is where the “drain the swamp” refrain rings true to them.
For the last eight years, President Obama has largely dealt with an obstructionist Republican Congress, and to many Americans, little got done outside of the ACA (passed during the two years where we had a Democratic Congress). This, of course, is an easily argued point in that there are plenty of policies and actions that have happened during the Obama administration, but they are largely invisible or unimportant to the rural voter. Sure, economic relief and immigration policy are very important issues, but not to someone living in a homogeneous town that the stimulus package bypassed. To that someone, nothing has happened in the last eight years, and it’s because of a polarized and bickering Washington.
So, when the Republican primaries were on, these voters found their voice and used it to prop up Trump. They saw in him a mouthpiece for their plight. A candidate who is not beholden to the political elite that has done nothing for them. A potential president that no one in Washington likes, so he must have something new they detest, or even fear. As the ancient proverb goes, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
As a candidate, has Trump himself had a further polarizing effect? I’m not convinced of that. When the options are A or B, there’s no way to not be polarized. In a way, Trump offered the appearance of an option C.
- Option A, you vote Republican because you support them.
- Option B, you vote Democrat because you support them.
- Option C, you vote Trump because he’s not really either and you’re tired of both.
In the case of this election, the Option A and the Option C people ended up voting for the same guy. Victory for Trump because he was presented as the non-polarized candidate.
This, of course, puts aside the rhetoric he used throughout his candidacy and looks at the raw numbers. Don’t worry, I’ll get to that stuff too, but not here.
What can we make of this? It’s actually not the easiest of takeaway messages to hear, but it might be that future successful candidates need to do exactly what past successful candidates did: moderate for the general election. Trump did that, believe it or not, and it worked. Clinton did not, and it did not work. He provided a centrist argument (I’m neither A nor B, vote for me!) and grabbed voters that fell into this part of the spectrum. According to Fiorina, that’s most of them. Clinton provided the left argument (I’m definitely not A, vote for me!) and lost a lot of centrist support.
Yeah, it might just be that simple.