Polarization destroys democratic accountability

#2 in a three part series

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay?" —Trump in 2016

In 2022, the Democratic Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, had a stroke. In the days after, it was unclear what his recovery would be like. Would he be able perform his Senate duties if elected?

Now imagine you were a Pennsylvania voter in 2022. The Democrat has a stroke — would you consider voting for the Republican instead?

That Republican, the TV personality Dr. Oz, was like any Republican: against abortion; in favor of fracking; and he would have voted for an upper class tax cut. Whatever he thought individually, he would be a reliable Republican vote in the Senate, voting for everything you disagreed with.

There is just no way you really could switch sides.

This logic applies beyond when your side’s candidate has debilitating health issue — for something that a politician might actually be personally at fault for. The other side is too different, so you can’t switch. Your side’s candidate could do almost anything wrong and you just couldn’t fathom switching to the other side.

Maybe even shoot someone on Fifth Avenue.

Public division → DC division

In the last polarization post, we defined polarization as the parties losing any overlap on the issues, and we said that this leads to gridlock, obstruction, and policy flip flops that hurt U.S. credibility. That loss of overlap on issues was focused on DC politicians. This is called “elite polarization” — but it rests atop a polarized and divided public (“popular polarization”), which incentivizes the conflict. So in this post, I want to add voters into our picture before return to the decline of democratic government for our third polarization post.

Here, we’ll see what happens when the sides get so far apart that voters basically can’t change sides. How does it change politicians’ incentives? What does this do to democracy?

Polarization destroys democratic accountability

Point #1 is that having voters switch sides is fundamental to democracy.

In a healthy system, a politician needs to be worried that voters will leave their side if they do the wrong thing. It’s sort of why democracy exists, to create an incentive for leaders to govern well and not be despots. But when the two sides' beliefs get so far apart, most of a politician’s voters are basically locked in — the politician can fail miserably, even break the law, and still have a solid shot at keeping power.

It helps to compare this to business. When a private market is competitive, companies have to innovate and keep prices down to stay alive. In a monopoly, companies take advantage of consumers because there is nowhere else to go. Polarization is like a monopoly. When the sides get far apart — without any overlap at all — it gives each side monopoly power over like-minded voters. They can get away with a lot before those voters will ever defect.

Did people really used to switch sides?

In Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized, he notes that the average swing between how a state voted in one presidential election to the next from 1972 to 1984 was 7 points. Between 2000 and 2012? Less than 2 points. That’s where we were entering the Trump era. Voters were already getting fixed in place on either side, whereas in the past, they used to move back and forth.

Hold that point. We’ll start with it in the next section. But first, we have to consider the fact that this switching seems strange to us. It seems like people would have to completely abandon their values to switch, right?

That wasn’t the case in the past. The other side used to have at least some of your values, if not all of them. Since the 70s, we’ve sorted more neatly into diametrically opposing camps, culturally as well as politically. This is the thing we feel in real life even when we don’t pay attention to the news.

Here’s a quick test to show how deeply we know this division. Which party did each person vote for?

1. Lives in a city

2. Loves God

3. Lives on a farm

4. Is an atheist

5. Drives a Prius

6. Drives a pickup

7. Is liberal

8. Is conservative

All of these things used to be less correlated. But now, when I tell you someone’s car preference, you can tell me a whole bunch of other preferences they probably have. I recall in 2015, there was a rift over the popular war movie American Sniper. If I told you which side someone was on, you could probably guess all of the categories that fit into in the test above.

The story of how we got this divided fills many books, so I’ll just bullet point a few key themes before we return to the effects of people not switching:

• Party sorting: It didn’t used to be the case that Democrat was a synonym for liberal and Republican a synonym for conservative. When Democrats became the party of civil rights after the 60s, that issue started moving conservatives into the Republican Party and liberals into the Democratic Party.

• Geographic sorting: Democrats continually squeeze a similar share of the national vote out of fewer and fewer counties — Bill Clinton won more counties than Obama, Obama more than Hillary. Our party gets more concentrated in cities over time, which ties in with a bunch of other cultural preferences, too.

• Affective polarization: The more we sorted (by ideology and by geography, and later by education) the more we did what every human group does, which is hate the out-group. Political scientists measure this by asking questions like, Would you be displeased if your child married someone from the other party? Between the 60s and the 2010s, the number of people displeased at inter-party marraige jumped from ~5% to ~40%.

Over decades, each of these pressures reinforced the other, slowly driving us away with the help of am increasingly fractured media.

Maybe if you have car- and movie-type preferences that clash with your rural hometown, you move to a city for reasons that seem unrelated to politics, where you sip lattes and learn tree pose and start voting for Democrats. Your new tribal identity gins up your group psychology. This leads to more shedding of your old preferences; it also fuels your confirmation bias, so evidence-based questions, like how you see the state of the economy, depend on your politico-cultural affiliation. That reinforces your voting pattern, etc.

Polarized DC politics rests atop this whole foundation of a more sorted and polarized country. Politics is filtered through all of our identities in a way it wasn’t before. That’s why we can’t really imagine switching sides now. Each side has a monopoly on like-minded voters. Only a few people with unsorted beliefs switch each election.

Trump is enabled by polarization

Fewer people were switching in presidential elections by the 2000s because of massive cultural sorting. If anything could have changed this, a candidate as strange and deficient as Trump would shock the system, right? Surely he would jumble our hardened political alignments.

“What’s surprising about the 2016 election results isn’t what happened,” Ezra Klein writes, “It’s what didn’t happen […] the campaign, by the numbers, was mostly a typical contest between a Republican and a Democrat.” Looking at election data, Trump may as well have been like Mitt Romney. Even in 2020 — after more people died here than in comparable countries because of his pandemic mismanagement, which were, like, real people dying in both conservative and liberal places — our divides remained relatively stable.

Consider that deeply: the system was basically unresponsive to a catastrophe.

How did so many Republicans stay stuck in place during the Trump era? It wasn’t foreordained that he’d be able to round them all up. He won around 30-35% in his first Republican primaries in 2016. The larger share of Republicans all faced a critical question at some point after that. They supported a normal person like Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush in the primary, and sometime between then and now — during one of Trump’s many, many absurdities — they had to ask, Will I defect?

They faced, essentially, the same dilemma I presented at the top. APennsylvania Democrat had to consider whether to vote for Fetterman after he had a stroke — they felt like they didn’t have another option, so they rationalized their support. At some point, the same was true for all of these people. They felt they couldn’t switch so they reduced cognitive dissonance by becoming fans.

The most prescient thing Donald Trump ever said was that he could probably shoot voters on fifth avenue and not lose voters. It is that basic belief — that he can’t lose voters — that encourages him to run roughshod over the laws. It’s what underwrites Republicans in Congress letting him get away with it, too. He cannot be punished for his lawlessness in the way democracy intends. Rather than being the cause of polarization, it’s best to think of him as enabled by it.

Polarization makes polarization worse

To close, let’s go back to that comparison between competitive politics and a competitive private market. When politics is stuck, it means politicians are less accountable, as we’ve discussed. But it also means they actively make the problem worse when they campaign and govern. Political strategy changes.

When politics is healthy, the whole point is to win over that group of people who are switching. You have to appeal to the consensus areas of American politics. You have to try to run on a record of things you got done, which means cooperating in some ways with the majority party instead of obstructing.

If no one switches, the way you win an election is by motivating your own side. You need more of your people to turn out to vote. This is called a “mobilization” strategy — you fire up your troops. This means no compromise. This means doubling down on your team’s issues.

Polarization makes polarization worse. It makes extreme tactics and more divisive positions seem strategically sensible. At first glance, it makes sense for Democrats to be mad at Chuck Schumer for passing the Republican spending bill last month. At first glance, it makes sense to mirror Trump’s populism with a fiery brand of our own. At first glance.

With the context of polarization, our task gets harder: oppose, but how? Defy an authoritarian takeover without contributing to our systemic breakdown.

To be concerned about polarization is not to abandon our passions. But it does mean we have a responsibility to understand how those passions could play into the breakdown. In the next and final polarization post, we’ll consider this. Oppose, but how?