Inside the two Americas
Washington Bureau Chief Daniel Dale examines two other key factors that contribute to the political polarization of the United States
Geography
It can seem rude to quiz a stranger about their political views. To figure out whether a new American acquaintance is a dedicated Republican or Democrat, though, you don’t have to. Just ask this: would you rather live in a big house with shops and restaurants miles away, or a smaller house with those amenities within walking distance?
Three-quarters of consistently conservative Americans pick the big house, according to a Pew Research survey in 2014, while three-quarters of consistently liberal Americans pick the smaller house.
That’s possibly because they’re already living their lifestyle preferences. U.S. cities have grown far more Democratic and liberal over the past 20 years. Rural and semirural communities have grown far more Republican and conservative.
“There really are two Americas. An urban one and a rural one,” a Washington Post analyst wrote in 2014. “America’s starkest divide,” NBC declared in 2015.
The divide, to be clear, is not between Republican rural states, for example Wyoming, and Democratic big cities, such as Boston. It’s between urban areas everywhere in the country, red states and blue states, and the rural communities near them. In the 2012 election, Barack Obama carried 27 of America’s 30 biggest cities. Among them: Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, Texas, a state where he was smoked 57 per cent to 41per cent overall.
The smaller the town, the worse Obama did. In cities of 500,000 or more, Obama beat Mitt Romney 69 per cent to 29 per cent, historian Eric Zuesse found. But towns of 10,000 to 50,000 chose Romney by a margin of 56 per cent to 42 per cent. Romney won rural communities 61 per cent to 37 per cent.
There is an undeniable racial component to the urban-rural split. Lowdensity communities are overwhelmingly white, and whites lean Republican by a nine-point margin. But rural white people also disagree on virtually everything with urban white people: Obamacare (urban whites for, rural whites against), free trade (urban whites for, rural whites against), racism against black people (urban whites say it’s a significant problem, rural whites not so much).
It’s tempting to chalk up the polarization to an eternal cultural gap between country folk and city slickers. But the gap wasn’t nearly so stark even 20 years ago.
There was a “mass defection” of rural counties to the Republicans between the 1996 and 2000 elections. 856 of America’s 3,000-odd counties changed hands, according to the book The Big Sort, and all but two of them switched from Democratic to Republican.
What’s happening? In their 2008 book, journalist Bill Bishop and sociologist Robert G. Cushing argue that Americans have been deliberately clustering with like-minded people since 1970.
Rural counties aren’t becoming more Republican because farmers are becoming much more conservative, though some of them are. It’s that conservatives who don’t like liberal cities are moving into rural communities where they aren’t going to be bothered by liberalism. Race
In his presidential announcement speech, Donald Trump declared “the American Dream is dead.” Pundits scoffed at his over-the-top negativity. It turned out he was skilfully reading the public mood. The white-public mood. After a year in which the killings of young black men provoked vocal outrage and a quarter of black households earned less than the poverty line, the country remains profoundly divided by race. But not always in obvious ways.
Blacks are poorer and sicker than whites, more likely to be shot, more likely to go to failing schools. But they are far more optimistic about the future than whites are: 43 per cent of blacks, versus just 19 per cent of whites, say the American Dream is alive and well. Blacks are also more upbeat about the present: about twothirds believe the country is on the right track, compared to about a quarter of whites.
Hispanics, too, are much cheerier than non-Hispanic whites. And they have much different political preferences. In the Democratic primary, about 60 per cent support Hillary Clinton, about 20 per cent support Bernie Sanders. In a general election, they lean strongly to the Democrats, the party that has embraced immigration reform over Trumpian demonization. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, is the strongest candidate among Hispanics, but Clinton is beating even him by 20 percentage points.
Blacks and whites have come together on some racial issues. Only 20 years ago, just 45 per cent of whites supported black-white marriages, versus 68 per cent of blacks.
In 2013, it was up to 84 per cent of whites and 96 per cent of blacks. A happy sign. But the black-white convergence on particular racial matters does not extend to their views on race rela- tions in the abstract. Specifically: white people, so pessimistic about the state of America, are far more optimistic about black progress than black people are. Last year, just 53 per cent of whites said more needed to be done to give blacks equal rights with whites — and that was an unusually high figure recorded just after the white supremacist massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston. Eighty-six per cent of blacks, conversely, said more was needed.
Obama, the first black president, won 95 per cent of the black vote in 2008 and 93 per cent in 2012. Trump’s camp claims he can seize a hefty share of those voters — all of them, even.
But it wasn’t Obama’s blackness that created the overwhelming margin, it was his party label: 88 per cent of blacks voted for John Kerry in 2004, 90 per cent for Al Gore in 2000.
So long as the Republican nominee is campaigning to restore a supposedly glorious American past few blacks prefer to the present, the black vote is not going anywhere.
Blacks are poorer and sicker than whites, more likely to be shot, more likely to go to failing schools. Still, they’re more optimistic than whites, polls show