William A. Galston
By most measures, the U.S. has become far more polarized than it was when I cast my first vote in 1968. And politically, the kind of polarization that matters most is geographical.
In the close 1976 election between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, 20 states were decided by margins of less than 5 percentage points. By 2000, when Al Gore and George W. Bush faced off in another close election, only 12 states ended up this category. That number fell to 11 in 2016 and eight in 2020. During this period, few states became more competitive. Instead, most red states became redder, and blue states bluer, while many swing states shifted decisively toward one or the other party.
County lines are nearly as stable as state borders, and polarizing shifts within counties are similarly pronounced. As recently as 1992, 38% of voters lived in counties that gave winning margins of at least 20 points to Democrats or Republicans. By 2016 the share of these voters had risen to 60%, and this trend appears to have continued in 2020.
Against this backdrop, it should come as no surprise that the number of competitive congressional districts has declined sharply. In 1999, according to Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, 164 seats were within 5 points of the nearly even national partisan divide. That number has since been cut in half. The number of seats that remain competitive in every election—what Cook calls “hyper-swing seats”—has fallen during this period by 58%, from 107 to 45. In more than 80% of districts, the outcome is for all practical purposes determined in the dominant party’s primary election, typically low-turnout affairs dominated by the most committed voters.
One of the main drivers of geographical polarization is the widening gap between rural and urban America. In an illuminating new study, Cornell’s Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown show that as recently as three decades ago, rural and urban voting patterns in presidential elections closely tracked each other. In 1996 Bob Dole’s share of the rural vote was only 3 points higher than his urban share, even though he was Republican from Kansas. In 2020 Donald Trump’s gap was 21 points. He received 64% of the rural vote and 43% of the urban vote.
It is tempting but wrong to view this divide as the consequence of the South’s political realignment. Yes, the urban-rural gap between the parties widened to 18 points in the South, but it expanded even more in the Midwest (22 points) and the West (20 points), with the Northeast not far behind at 15 points.
According to Ms. Mettler and Mr. Brown, two main forces drove this widening. First, the economic fortunes of urban and rural America have diverged sharply. Since the 1980s, manufacturing has been about twice as important for rural areas as for their urban counterparts. The decline of manufacturing jobs since 2000 has hit rural areas especially hard. Many small towns depended heavily on single manufacturing plants, whose closure sent many of them in a downward spiral that proved hard to reverse.
In 1970, the education gap between rural and urban areas was modest. Today, 35% of urban residents have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 21% for rural Americans. This helps explain why urban areas were more able to take advantage of the expanding information economy. An incredible 94% of the nation’s job growth since 2000 has occurred in urban counties, while almost half of their rural counterparts have suffered net job losses during the same period. Similarly, since the turn of the century, the population of urban counties has risen at more than twice the rate of rural counties, 41% of which have experienced population losses. When rural Americans say they feel left behind, this is part of what they mean.
The second large force driving the urban-rural political divide, the authors argue, is the growing nationalization of policy, which many rural Americans view as efforts by educated urban Americans to enforce their elite outlook on issues ranging from racial, ethnic and gender identity to the environment, education, gun ownership, immigration and religious liberty. As the urban influence has grown in the Democratic Party, rural Americans have rallied behind the Republican Party in resistance.
These scholars show that we need not choose between economics and culture to explain the widening political gap between rural and urban America. In recent decades, the U.S. has experienced what the authors call “sequential polarization,” with rural economic decline increasing rural Americans’ receptivity to the Republican message of cultural resistance.
If Ms. Mettler and Mr. Brown are correct—and theirs is the most balanced and persuasive account I’ve seen—our current polarization is the result of tectonic economic and cultural shifts that won’t be reversed quickly or easily.
Appeared in the April 19, 2023, print edition as 'What Drives Political Polarization?'.
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