About the polarization of America

The WaPo reports about an in-depth analysis of factors that have driven American polarization to the unhappy, dysfunctional place we are at today. The core finding is quite interesting:

New report outlines the deep political polarization’s slow and steady march

Urban-rural division has grown dramatically over the past 25 years, according to data from the Cook Political Report

David Wasserman, senior editor of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, highlights the Kentucky district in a new deep dive into all 435 House districts to explain the geographical roots of political polarization and how hollowed-out the political middle has become.

Although legislative gerrymandering plays a key role in letting representatives choose their constituents, the nation’s “urban/rural polarization” has been a much bigger factor over the past 25 years, Wasserman wrote.

“The electorate has simply become much more homogenous than it used to be,” he wrote in the newly released analysis.

It’s part of a nationwide realignment highlighted by the new rankings of the “Cook Partisan Voting Index,” which operatives in both parties have examined for years to help determine which districts are truly up for grabs every two years.

Districts like Rogers’s in Appalachia now have more in common with a rural district nearly 900 miles away in eastern Oklahoma — in terms of income and education levels, home property values and the number of people living in poverty — than Kentucky’s 6th District directly to the north and west.  

In 1999, 164 seats fell into that Cook PVI margin to qualify as swing seats. Now, just 82 fit that statistical data point.

There’s a real-world impact, on policy issues, that happens through all of this political sorting. As fewer members of the House need to worry about the general election, more and more grow concerned about losing primaries to ideological challengers from their left or right flanks.

Data like that leads one to wonder if anything at all could reverse America's continuing slide into extremism. The forces fostering polarization are powerful and not going to go away. Nearly all House seats are safe, so incumbents move farther toward the safety of their activist base to avoid being outflanked by someone more extreme. 

One experiment that at least some red and some blue states could try is imposing a mandatory requirement to vote. There voting means at least returning a ballot. It does not mean voting for anything or anyone you don't want to vote for. Would that affect deep polarization in gerrymandered districts where one side or the other is safe? Since red states are hell-bent on neutering elections, there's no chance of the experiment being tried in any of those states. And, Dems who control blue states may not be interested in such an experiment either.