THE GREAT DIVIDE
As voting phase of a riotous primary gets underway in Iowa, the parties are farther apart than they’ve been in 80 years
DES MOINES, IOWA— You hear Adam Khan talk about himself and think America maybe isn’t so divided after all. Then you hear him talk about America. Khan, 24, is the son of a Pakistani immigrant father and a white mother. Last year, he was elected chairman of the Republican Party in a key swing county in the swing state of Nevada. He is a young brown man with Muslim heritage — and a supporter of gay marriage — rising fast in the domain of older white conservatives.
Watching with alarm as Americans turn against each other.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump, Khan said, is threatening to make the party more welcoming to bigots than minorities. His Reno-area community, meanwhile, is more politically polarized than ever.
“The Democrats blame (George W.) Bush for everything. The Republicans blame Obama for everything,” he said. “And it just perpetuates the divide.”
The voting phase of a rollicking presidential primary finally begins today, when Iowa’s Republicans and Democrats jam into gymnasiums for their party caucuses.
The outcome will clarify a confounding campaign.
One thing is already clear: the state of the union is not united at all.
It’s not just that Republicans and Democrats disagree on how to solve pressing problems; they disagree on what the problems even are. They have starkly different desires about where to live and how to live. And they plain don’t like each other as much as they used to.
“All the data that we have suggests that, today, things are much more polarized than they have been at any point at least over the last 80 years or so, and probably even further,” said Jocelyn Kiley, associate director of research for the polling organization Pew Research. President Barack Obama campaigned as a unifying healer. Over his seven years in office, the gulf between the parties has grown wider — both in the way their politicians vote and in the way their supporters feel.
It’s personal. In 1960, 5 per cent of Republicans and 4 per cent of Democrats said they would be displeased if their child married someone from the other party. In 2014: 17 per cent and 15 per cent.
“There are racial gaps in political values, there are gender gaps in political values. But those gaps really haven’t grown,” said Kiley. “Whereas partisan gaps have grown.”
The polarization has been driven by the parties themselves. The Democratic Party once included southern conservatives, the Republican Party northern liberals. No longer. Political elites have sorted themselves out ideologically since the 1970s, turning the Democrats into the party of the left and the Republicans the party of the right. Following their lead, average Americans have become more ideological, too.
The slow drift accelerated during the Bush and Obama presidencies. More Americans are uniformly con- servative than ever before, more Americans uniformly liberal. Ignore the fact that 40 per cent identify as independents — almost all of them lean toward a party. True swing voters, in other words, have nearly vanished. One political scientist found they now make up a mere 5 per cent of the country.
That figure helps explain this extraordinary year. The disappearance of the centre has allowed candidates to focus on their parties’ bases.
“Ninety-four per cent or more of the electorate will either be locked on one side or the other,” uncompromising conservative Ted Cruz told the National Review, “and it will be a turnout race.”
Democrat Hillary Clinton, seeking to fend off a challenge from leftwinger Bernie Sanders, has offered an unabashedly liberal platform incompatible with her reputation for cautious centrism. Trump, though not an orthodox conservative, has taken the field far to the right on immigration and terrorism; Cruz has done the same on other issues.
Republican voters press their candidates on threats to their safety and to the Constitution. Democratic voters ask theirs about the dangers of climate change and income inequality. Town halls held in the same Iowa counties sound like they are taking place in different countries.
“The divide is great,” said Jeff Jorgensen, Republican chairman in Iowa’s Pottawattamie County. “It’s almost a divide that can’t be bridged.”
Each party could have its nominee by April. And then they’ll embark on a billion-dollar contest that might persuade almost nobody to switch sides.