PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "Is America Polarized? "

« Back to Is America Polarized? main page

Transcript for:

Is America Polarized?

Think Tank - Ben Wattenberg
with Michael Barone and Morris Fiorino

Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. One of the most enduring images of the 2000 presidential election is the map of an America divided between the Republican Red states in the south and west, and Democratic Blue states on the coasts and Great Lakes. Many academics and pundits say a hopeless cultural divide between Red and Blue was polarizing the nation as never before.

But does the so-called cultural divide really exist? Is the Red and Blue map of America just a new graphic representation of an old political fact of life?

To find out, Think Tank is joined by...

Morris Fiorina, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, and author of 'Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America'

AND

Michael Barone, senior writer of US News and World Report, author of 'Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling, and the Battle for the Nation’s Future' and coauthor of 'The Almanac of American Politics.'

The Topic before the House: Is America Polarized? This week on Think Tank.

WATTENBERG: Michael Barone, Morris Fiorina, welcome to Think Tank. Mo, the title of your book is 'Culture War: The Myth of a Polarized America?' What are we talking about here? We’ve got this map, which appears again and again if you watch these television talk shows, as if the map, which is not particularly accurate in my judgment, has driven this whole argument. So where do you come out on this?

FIORINA: Well, I think the red-blue map, as you say, is extremely misleading. The differences between red and blue states are just not that significant in most cases, and the broader picture of an America engulfed in a culture war is extremely misleading. Pundits and political scientists who have made claims to the contrary are...

WATTENBERG: Michael is a pundit, so...

FIORINA: Well, Michael’s OK, he has enough caveats in his work. If you look hard at the data, these kinds of differences tend to just slip away. There’s just been a lot of exaggeration.

WATTENBERG: I have a couple of numbers here, which I’m sure you are all familiar with but I’m not sure all our leaders, our viewers are... or our leaders... that the difference in the year 2000 between winner and loser ... in Iowa it was about 4,000 votes; New Hampshire, 7,000 votes; New Mexico, 366 votes; Oregon, 7,000; Wisconsin, 6,000 and of course Florida, 573?

BARONE: 537 though I’m still challenging the final Broward County numbers which were accepted as making any difference. I think it was more like 1,000. I mean Mo was obviously right that on a lot of issues voters are in the middle. If you go to, you know, to San Francisco that you can find people the did vote for George W. Bush; if you go to even to a place like Plano, Texas you can find people that voted for Al Gore, and not everybody in a blue state votes blue or a red state votes red. There’s 18 states where the margin was less than 6% in the 2000 election. Those have been generally taken as the battleground in the 2004 election by both major party candidates.
What I think we do see in our politics, if not in our daily life, though, a degree of polarization by area in steadfastness of support that we didn’t see in the past. Al Gore got a higher percentage of Manhattan than Lyndon B. Johnson did in 1964. George W. Bush got a higher percentage in Montana than Richard Nixon got in 1972 when he was winning in a landslide. So some of the areas of the country have become more different from one another.
The other thing that I’ve seen in the election return is that we’ve had for the last, I would say nine years, a kind of deadlock. Voters are behaving as if they were in armies in a culture war.

FIORINA: I agree with him that there’s more stability in voting alignments and I think a lot of that can be attributed to the fact that the parties have sorted themselves out better. That liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats have largely been driven out of their parties...

BARONE: Which many political scientists urged on us for many years!

FIORINA: Yes, I know. Be careful what we wish for. Yes. But what that has done is given voters a clearer set of choices.

WATTENBERG: The certain hypocrisy there is - on the sort of goodie two shoes, do-good side of this argument, a couple decades ago people were saying well, you know; why are there liberal Republicans; why are there conservative Democrats? They ought to sort them out. We ought to have a liberal party...

BARONE: To be more rational.

WATTENBERG: ...be more rational and now you’ve got more of that and everybody saying, 'Oh, my God. We’ve split the country apart.'

FIORINA: Yeah, I think as long as people have those very stark choices they’ll tend to be on one side or the other of the divide. But what’s interesting is like one of my favorite examples. In 2000, the six states in which George Bush did the worst - excuse me, Al Gore did the best; okay, same thing... all elected Republican governors in 2002. And so there are swing voters out there who will respond. And who are they? They’re people like Pataki; people like Romney in Massachusetts and in of course 2003 they went for Schwarzenegger. Twenty percent of the Democrats who voted in 2003 in California voted for Schwarzenegger. So given the right choices they will switch over, but as long as they’re faced with highly conservative Republicans, highly liberal Democrats, they’re going to look pretty stable in their voting.

BARONE: And this is a sort of stability that we really haven’t seen or that’s unusual in American history. I mean, you know, we’ve had three straight presidential elections; we had three straight house elections of which neither major party got a majority of the vote. The last time that happened was in the 1880s and early 1890s and we don’t, you know, the one person that could have helped us understand that era is no longer with us - Strom Thurmond. So consequently you know, that was a period in which politics was polarized in particular around the Civil War. The lingering memories... and curiously in this campaign we hear about a 35-year-old war, Vietnam. People are arguing the sixties again.

WATTENBERG: People say - people say that in the good old days it basically used to be a referendum about the economy and now they’re saying there are all these cultural issues. Is that sort of part of this argument?

FIORINA: Oh, yes. Well I think clearly we went through a period where economics dominated but looked at historically that’s - that’s an unusual period...

WATTENBERG: Well I just want to make point. I wrote this book Values Matter Most which gets into some of this American history and electoral and polling history and one of the people I interviewed was Michael Barone who made exactly that point that we have had elections in America that had been non-economic in nature. I mean, the women’s vote and slavery and hard money/soft money.

FIORINA: Catholic/Protestant.

WATTENBERG: Catholic/Protestant.

BARONE: North and south.

WATTENBERG: North and south. And that it is not written in stone somewhere that, you know, why don’t we get back to those good old economic arguments? When I did that Values book in the mid ’90s I put together a list of non-economic issues that in the previous decade had come up as allegedly major voting issues. And here they are. I’ll read them very quickly ’cause it’s long. Here they are alphabetically: Abortion, amnesty, bra-burning, bus and capital punishment, condoms in the classroom, crime, dependency, discipline in the school, disparagement of America, disrupting, draft-dodging, drugs, elitism, family values, feminism, flag-burning, Gennifer Flowers, gays in the military, gun control, homelessness, homosexuality - I’ll just finish it - values, welfare, Willie Horton and the work ethic. There were all sort of essentially non-economic issues. So this idea that there is a - suddenly a culture war it strikes us suddenly. I mean this has been with us for a long time now.

FIORINA: Well first of all I think we’d have to take three quarters of that list and say these were media flaps but they weren’t voting issues.

WATTENBERG: Yes, I think so. And a lot of the stuff we’re getting now is media flaps.

FIORINA: Yes. There was a Gallup poll in the spring that I loved that they gave people fifteen issues and asked them how important these would be in the vote in 2004 and abortion, gun control and gay marriage ranked 13, 14, and 15 out of the 15.

WATTENBERG: Abortion is always low. The gun control one is a little misleading because the NRA has a record of getting its voters out. I mean, they’ve got about three million people or something and you’ve done it a lot, I know - you talk to the politicians and they are deathly afraid of the NRA.

BARONE: John Kerry actually made a point of it from the day of the expiration of the so-called assault weapons ban that he tried to convert that into a terrorism issue. But that’s, you know, gun control is an issue that tests very well nationally. But when it comes to getting more specific about taking away guns from people or allowing them to become licensed, one of the things we’ve seen is at the state level we’ve got 38 states now that have laws that basically allow law abiding citizens to be able to get a license to carry a concealed weapons. That’s a majority of the country. The national elites in their media always want to talk about gun control, but in fact we have had a proliferation of gun ownership and we have not - it’s not been accompanied by the kind of riots in the - gunfights in the streets that some of the opponents of vast measures feared and which I myself feared when they first came forward.

WATTENBERG: Let me just ask this. The dividing point that I’ve seen that makes the most sense and seems to link up best to a lot of these arguments is of the churched versus the unchurched, so-called. Or people who go to church and are religious, go to church once a week or more; are more likely to vote Republican and people who do not go to church once a week or more are more likely to be Democratic. Does that one make sense?

FIORINA: We have a diagram in the book that shows this very sharp divergence between weekly churchgoers and non-churchgoers, but there’s two things to say about that. First, it happens very suddenly. Happens in 1992. up to that point there’s not much and then suddenly it blows up and I attribute that really to Bill Clinton and that leads to the second point that as long as politicians...

WATTENBERG: Well but the Clinton thing was that he not only professed faith but he was from the South and that’s where that...

FIORINA: Well it was more of the fact that he was an adulterer, smoked dope, was gay-friendly, etcetera.
No, the point I was going to make is why would church attendance...

WATTENBERG: That he allegedly smoked dope.

FIORINA: Allegedly, yes. Why would church attendance have been relevant to deciding how to vote between Mike Dukakis or the Senior Bush? Deciding how to vote between Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan? They didn’t offer you any real choice on morality or private behavior. Bill Clinton did. And with George Bush’s embrace of the religious right and the Democratic Party’s increasing move to the secular side, they are now offering voters a choice on that dimension and voters will take that choice. Whereas when they’re not offered a choice it won’t show up in their voting.

WATTENBERG: What role has this whole issue of homosexuality and gay marriage had and where do people come out on it? Because that’s one that’s really right at the cutting edge for now. It may not be, you know, five or ten years from now, it’ll be on one of those lists - 'Hey would you believe we argued about this?' But where’s the country now?

FIORINA: I think it’s hard to say and this - when all this stuff in Massachusetts and San Francisco came out right when our book was going to press. And there’s a little bit in there. I think the - the where I came down and where I think none of the data have suggested we’re wrong is that, you know, people are opposed to it at a certain level and favor the view that a visceral reaction will favor our Constitutional amendment, but it’s simply not an intense feeling. It’s not something that’s a voting issue for that many people and how it actually plays out politically in terms of mobilizing the Republican base, in terms of the initiatives they’re on, I mean I think it’s hard to say and it might have some short term impact.

BARONE: Well, opinion has changed on these issues terrifically and Mo’s book points this out. There have been vast changes in opinion. It was unthinkable even ten years ago that you would have same sex marriage issue on the ballot. Now it’s something that’s being discussed. I think it’s unfortunate, in my view, that this Massachusetts court has come to a 4-3 decision that has then spurred opponents of same sex marriage into going to the ballot and they’re going to be on the ballot among battleground states in Arkansas, Oregon, Michigan and probably Ohio.

WATTENBERG: We had in the year 2000, as everyone knows, a razor-thin election in terms of the results. Now structurally you can’t say much about what’s going to happen in 2008 but there will be a census in 2010 which will reapportion the states once again. Insofar as you can dust off your crystal balls, are we in a situation where we’re going to continue to have these 50-50 style elections?

BARONE: I think one thing that might happen Ben, is that we might get a different candidate choice and this plays off what Mo was saying earlier. At the Republican National Convention this year I was on the floor next to the Texas delegation when Rudi Giuliani spoke to the convention on Monday night. They were crazy about him. They love him. Tom Cole, Congressman of Oklahoma tells me his delegation was strong for Giuliani. I think it’s possible that Rudi Giuliani or if we amend the Constitution, Arnold Schwarzenegger, could be serious contenders for the Republican presidential nomination and that the veto that’s been exercised over Republican candidates by abortion opponents and other cultural conservatives from 1980 through 2000 may no longer be dispositive in the Republican party. At least there’s a chance that that could be true.

WATTENBERG: You buy into that?

FIORINA: I would defer to Michael who’s a demographic expert. I think - I think he’s put his finger on the problem in the Republican party -- this divide between the social conservatives on the one hand who have really become the core of the party and the more libertarian conservatives who aren’t interested in issues like abortion and gay rights and so forth. And the problem with Republicans becoming the majority party is a lot of the - the sort of people who might support them on fiscal grounds won’t go with them on the social issues. In California the big Republican losses - people talk about 'Blue California' - this was a red state! It went blue in about a ten-year period between the demise of Wilson and sort of the rise of Clinton.

WATTENBERG: Of Pete Wilson?

FIORINA: Pete - I mean, Pete Wilson was sort of the last hurrah. And so we’ve been... blue for ten years but the areas of great Republican loss in California...

WATTENBERG: You say we... you’re from California?

FIORINA: From California. The areas of great Republican loss in California are upscale economic areas. They’re areas of affluent people who vote for environmental issues, for pro-choice initiatives, for gun control. That’s where they’ve lost their ground.

BARONE: I just think that one of the things that the Republican convention told me was that Schwarzenegger and Giuliani were not talking about the divisive social issues. They were talking about national strength in a time of war. That was their subject matter. And on that they’re not really distinguishable from John McCain, who is an opponent of abortion for example and takes culturally conservative views on some other issues, though his friends in the press sort of like to overlook that because... that’s not their points of view. It seems to me that depending on what the environment is in 2008, I could see a candidate like that succeeding. I mean Rudy Giuliani has been I think to all 50 states campaigning. When Haley Barbour was running for governor of Mississippi he asked Rudy Giuliani to come down and campaign for him.

WATTENBERG: Is that...

BARONE: He’s a man that supports gay rights; a man who is against the partial birth abortion ban but Haley Barbour wanted Mississippi and he got a great crowd, a great ovation and raised lots of money.

WATTENBERG: Mo, is it possible that we’ve all been sort of gulled in sort of the 'Wizard of Oz' fashion with these social conservatives standing behind a screen saying 'we’re so powerful, we’re so powerful! And in point of fact, unless you have the middle swing voter in either party, I mean, Jim Jeffords or Arlen Specter or whoever it is, you are not going to be able to cobble together a majority. That’s by definition the middle voter not only in America but within a legislative body is going to be very, very powerful and we have sort of tended - we the commentariat - has tended to sort of say, 'Oh, well, you know, Republican, liberals, or moderates; they have no power anymore.' Where would you come out on that?

FIORINA: Well, I’ll let you take some of the blame of course, but there’s a reality there, too which is the middle voter in the legislatures largely has disappeared. Not only in Congress but in some of the state legislatures. They are more polarized - the elites are more polarized than they used to be and part of it comes from redistricting. I mean, you have states where one party or the other has simply - or both parties have agreed to have all safe seats and so there’s basically no chance of...

BARONE: So you have California, Illinois, New York are all states like that and that means that, you know, there’s no serious Congressional races in states with almost a quarter of the House seats.

FIORINA: And then you have the primaries where the social conservatives are willing to go out and work. I mean, how do you explain the fact that California Republican Party’s been taken over by social conservatives? They work. They work.

BARONE: Or cultural liberals of the Democratic Party.

FIORINA: Yes. Yes. Exactly.

WATTENBERG: That is in my judgment the...

BARONE: And they contribute money.

WATTENBERG: That is the true outrage in American politics. This idea that, what is it, 2/3 of the people don’t effectively have a vote for the presidency because they’re 'not a battleground state'. I mean, you talk about disenfranchisement; these are people - why would you go out and vote if you live in Washington, D.C. unless your brother-in-law’s on the ballot for garbage commissioner or something. What role in the elections to come is this moderately large surge of both legal and illegal immigration coming into America going to play? The Latinos in America are not withstanding all the talk about them, have very low turnout records, don’t they?

FIORINA: And they’re also very young. So one of the things we looked at in terms of the California transition was Latino growth in areas had relatively little to do with the Democratic - the rising Democratic strength. It was more the drop-off in the affluent areas.

BARONE: Yes, the - I mean, they’re going to come into the electorate. There are large Latino populations in some of the battleground states this year; certainly in Florida, in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada. So both sides are paying for Spanish language advertising. I think that Latinos, though a small group, are growing and they’re one of the groups in the society which has an unusually large percentage of moveable people. They simply haven’t been in American politics long enough to have established a strong preference, at least many of them have not been...

WATTENBERG: The group - the group in America that’s growing most rapidly are Asians.

BARONE: Yes...

WATTENBERG: Percentage-wise.

BARONE: Yes and Asians include everybody from, you know, Koreans to Israelis, okay? So it’s not - and Latinos is not really one group. Their votes depend upon - in part on where they came from...

WATTENBERG: It’s about half Mexican.

BARONE: Yes, it’s about 60% Mexican but Norte–o Mexicans vote different from Michoacan Mexicans who are left-wing in Mexico; Norte–os have voted for the PAN party. They’re more open to being Republicans when they come here. There are a lot of - it’s a mixed and complicated bag and both parties are going to be scrambling to win over some of these voters on whichever way they can figure out.

FIORINA: Also, you know, in contrast to some of the people who think that the Latinos are simply not assimilating as earlier groups did, all the demographic data suggests that’s wrong. That Latinos in fact are assimilating faster than...

WATTENBERG: You have third generation Latinos, they all speak English and in fact some of them are going to school to learn Spanish so they can talk to their grandparents.

FIORINA: When my grandparents came over here they didn’t having Sesame Street blaring English into their homes on TVs; they didn’t have the cars; they didn’t have everything else.

WATTENBERG: OK, let’s wrap this up with a very simple, elemental question. This show is going to air at some point before the election. Tell me who’s going to win, by how much. Now, we’re in... so the audience knows we’re taping this at a time when Bush in most of the polls, although not the poll that Morris Fiorina has been working on - I mean, most of the polls shows Bush ahead somewhere in the 5- to 10-point range. Something like that. Now give me a sense or if you must duck, duck but with a reason and then we’ll get out.

FIORINA: I think the race is closer in the - will be closer than some of the polls are suggesting now. I think Bush is vulnerable, although he’s clearly ahead and he’s vulnerable on the whole Iraq War on Terrorism equation which if a certain percentage of the population decides at some point those two are not only non-identical but in fact contradictory then I think he could lose support.

WATTENBERG: Okay.

BARONE: Well I usually just have kind of a snap answer to this, which I’m not sure should be taken seriously but what I’ve been saying during the course of the campaign is the result I expect is Bush 51, Kerry 47 because those are the same percentages that William McKinley and William Jennings Byant got in 1896 and Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief strategist has long said that McKinley is one of his political models, the McKinley campaign. It’s also just one point different from the popular vote for the House of Representatives.

WATTENBERG: This is really the last question. Is it really out of the question that we will again at some point in the near term future - and I’m not talking about this election necessarily - but have a blowout election ˆ la Reagan/Mondale or Nixon/McGovern or Johnson versus Goldwater. Is that out of the question or are those sort of anomalies where one party nominates just an unacceptable candidate and it could happen again?

FIORINA: I think the only thing that would produce that given the conditions I foresee would be an event, some sort of terrible event or disaster.

BARONE: Or the complete disqualification of some candidate who cannot be - have his name substituted at the last minute. In fact for president you probably could substitute a name, because you’re voting for electors...

WATTENBERG: The way Sergeant Shriver was substituted for - or even worse.

BARONE: You know, Frank Lautenberg for Bob Torricelli at the end of September in 2002. I think until there’s some change in the structure of public opinion, and that change may be prompted by the emergence of a different kind of a candidate - presidential candidate for one or both parties - I believe, can’t prove; but I believe, that there’s a ceiling of about 50-51% on the Democratic party; think Bill Clinton and Al Gore at a time of apparent peace and prosperity in ’96 and 2000 came up pretty close to that peak. If you add 1/3 of the Perot vote to Clinton and one - and part of - 2/3 or the Nader vote to Gore, you get at about 51 or 50. I think the Republican party has a ceiling of about 53-54%. I think that in both cases the rest of the electorate is just so strongly against them that those votes are just not available given the current configurations and kinds of candidates we have.

WATTENBERG: So there is - let’s wrap this up and let mine be the last word. There is somewhat greater polarization than there was. Nod in approval or disapproval.

FIORINA: As long as we have those kinds of candidates, but remember what Michael said, barring some change in the kind of candidate they nominate.

BARONE: This will change someday, Ben. I can’t tell you when.

WATTENBERG: Okay. On that note, thank you very much Morris Fiorina, thank you Michael Barone, and thank you. Please, remember to send us your comments via email. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg.

Back to top

Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc.

©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved.

Web development by Bean Creative.