Trump is gone, but political division still is widespread

President Joe Biden had barely occupied the Oval Office long enough to arrange his desk and hang pictures, but voters already held firm opinions about his job performance. That’s how polarized Americans are.

In California, 89% of Democrats approved and 68% of Republicans disapproved of how he was handling his new job. Overall, counting independents, 65% of likely voters in this deep-blue state approved and 31% disapproved.

One telling stat: Only 4% were undecided.

Come on! It was just Biden’s first full day in office when the Public Policy Institute of California began polling. It stopped 10 days later. How could that short span at the infancy of a presidency possibly provide voters enough time to form an intellectually honest opinion of his performance?

Answer: It couldn’t. They mostly judged him on his party affiliation.

“People had already made up their minds because of partisan politics,” PPIC pollster Mark Baldassare said. “It’s remarkable. ... And independents tend to lean Democrat.”

But Bob Shrum, director of the Center for the Political Future at USC and a former Democratic strategist, thinks Biden mostly earned the high rating himself.

“His inaugural address probably had an impact,” Shrum says. “I thought it was the best inaugural speech since 1961,” when Democrat John F. Kennedy waxed eloquent.

Shrum says Biden “touched a nerve in a country yearning to go back — and forward — to an America where we did have some common purpose.”

Gallup polled nationally during the same period and reported an “extreme partisan gap.”

“Initial evaluations of presidents are more influenced by Americans’ party identification now than in the past,” Gallup says.

The polling organization found an 87-percentagepoint gap between Democratic and Republican views of Biden’s job performance — 98% of Democrats approved, but only 11% of Republicans did. Overall, it found 57% approval and 37% disapproval.

A second major California polling outfit, the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, surveyed state voters starting on Biden’s third day. Voters weren’t asked about the president’s job performance, only their “impression” of him.

Same result: 87% of Democrats had a favorable impression, 80% of Republicans viewed him unfavorably. Overall, including independents, California voters’ impressions of Biden were 62% favorable, 32% unfavorable, 6% no opinion.

“It’s a hyper-partisan world,” IGS poll director Mark DiCamillo says. “The distance between parties is wider than at any time in history — on most issues. ... We even get partisan replies on whether people should wear a mask.”

In the IGS poll, 93% of Democrats blamed Trump’s fiery rhetoric for “contributing” to the deadly storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. But only 29% of Republicans did.

And what’s causing the polarization?

“People have gone into their silos,” says Marty Wilson, executive vice president of the California Chamber of Commerce and a longtime political player.

“I don’t think polarization is a bad thing necessarily. But what we’ve lost is respect — respect for somebody else’s point of view, respect for the process, respect for the institutions.”

Republican consultant Rob Stutzman, an antiTrumper, blames politicians for fertilizing polarization.

“There’s a short-term incentive to perpetuate the division because politicians are essentially empowered by one extreme or the other,” he says. “Very few politicians are in the middle.”

Biden is an exception, however, and it paid off last year.

“If Biden can help bore America to death about politics again, that would be helpful,” Stutzman says.

We could also teach high schoolers more about civics and how democracy requires compromise. We could force ourselves to watch and read both sides. We could bring back “equal time” mandates for broadcast networks.

But for the foreseeable future, we’ll most likely remain in our igloos, silos and caves, devoid of outside light.