A NATION DIVIDED: CAN WE STAND?
Cultural and political segregation deepening
The divisions in our politics are etched into the nation’s geography. Today, six out of ten Americans live in a community where an exceedingly close election wasn’t close at all, where either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton won by more than 20 percentage points.
Robert Cushing and I have been tracking the political segregation of this country since 2004. What we found was a consistent trend. Democrats were increasingly living in some places. Republicans were clustering in others. The nation was sorting along party lines.
You could see these political puzzle pieces in presidential election results. In the close election of 1976 (between Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican Gerald Ford), 26.8 percent of voters lived in a county where one of the candidates won in a landslide of 20 points or more. (For this calculation, we excluded third parties.) That was a post-World War II low, the time when communities were most likely to have the same political makeup as the nation. Then we sorted. In 1992, 37.7 percent of voters lived in a landslide county. In 2000, it was 45.3 percent. In 2012, just over 50 percent. And now, with votes still being processed, 60.3 percent of the nation’s voters are living in a landslide county in an election that was anything but.
In many ways (excluding, of course, the candidates) this election was typical. Groups moved a few percentage points from Democrat to Republican and the Republican won. No big deal.
But when you get down
to the community level, the shifts were more dramatic. In counties outside metropolitan regions, Clinton’s totals are running about 17 percent below the vote for President Obama just four years ago. Trump’s nonmetropolitan vote is more than 10 percent higher than the Republican totals in 2012.
The landscape of the sorting is even more impressive. There are just over 3,100 U.S. counties. In this election, 2,482 of them (80 percent) had landslide outcomes. Four years ago, 65 percent of our counties had lopsided election results.
People we’ve talked with over the last 12 years about political segregation worry about what happens to a country where one political group doesn’t have to interact (bump grocery carts in the bread aisle; sit thigh to thigh in a pew) with the other. They have asked what can be done.
We don’t have an answer, but political segregation is only a small piece of the sorting. Pick nearly any demographic factor and the same pattern appears: Communities are growing more different from one another.
In some counties, people are living longer lives while in others children are living fewer years than their parents. People with college degrees are clustering in some counties and not in others. Incomes are zooming in some communities, slackening in others.
The sorting is aesthetic as well as political and economic. Regional accents are deepening. Democrats prefer neighborhoods where houses are close together while Republicans gravitate to places with more elbow room (or at least backyards). We have a young student from the Czech Republic staying with us for the school year in La Grange. Occasionally, we’ll drive into Austin from our camo-wearing town, where even the kids hanging out on the street will give you a look-‘em-in-the-eye “yes, sir.” It’s only about 65 miles, but when we get into Austin the European giggles and says people in what she calls the “city of the future” look “so different.”
With a difference in looks comes a different election outcome. In La Grange and Fayette County, eight out of ten voters went for Trump. In Austin and Travis County, two out of three voted for Clinton.
Look different, live different, talk different, earn different, vote different. And all the differences are increasing.
The two parties appear incapable of talking to the other side. Maybe disinterested is a better description. Politico reports that the Clinton campaign assigned one staffer to “rural outreach” during the final weeks of the campaign. The rural coordinator lived in Brooklyn. Republicans, meanwhile, gained votes in every geographic category except in cities of a million or more — that is, in America’s “cities of the future.”
And there you have it. One nation divided — divided by the clothes we wear, the way we talk, even what we talk about.
The solution? Empathy with the other, would be a start. Understanding where the other side is coming from, hearing the other side, maybe even living as neighbors.
But, really, this is America in 2016, so what are the chances for any of that?