RALEIGH – I know it’s kind of silly. It’s simplistic. It can be misleading. But I just can’t seem to ignore the whole “red state-blue state” formulation of American politics that has become all the rage.
A recent in-depth piece in the Christian Science Monitor helped to frame the issue well, and even provided a handy, color-coded map of the states that I put on my wall for easy reference. I count up the red states that cut a swath through the center of the country. I note the three fingers of blue states – Northeast, West Coast, and Great Lakes – and compare their Electoral College count to the reds’. And visions of purple political plums dance in my head.
The system does offer a clear potential to overstate the case. You’ve got to keep in mind that a supposedly “blue” state like Iowa often votes for Republicans and went for Al Gore in 2000 by only a scant few thousand votes. There’s enough crimson mixed in there to create a blue-violet hue, at least. On the other side, Florida and Arkansas are looking a bit magenta. Even North Carolina is a sort of burnt red.
Moreover, the extent to which American polities can be divided into three distinct categories – blue bloods, red bloods, and cross-breeds – does not necessarily relate to “polarization,” the phenomenon that so many political commentators have latched onto this year as explaining the presidential race between Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards. As Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson recently observed, in many ways states such as New York and Texas are more similar today than they were 30 or 40 years ago. Moreover, issues about which Americans used to passionately – and depressingly – disagree have more or less been resolved in the public mind, racial attitudes being a prime example.
Still, there is something going on here, I think. First, there is no question that the political parties are becoming more “polarized,” if that term connotes a clearer division of political interest and ideological consistency. There used to be lots of conservative Democrats, often in the South, and moderate-to-liberal Republicans, often in the Northeast. The boll weevils and gypsy moths are pretty much gone now, having either found a more comfortable partisan fit or passed away into the great (bipartisan) beyond.
Second, there do seem to be somewhat fewer voters in the middle – in play in any given election cycle. One clue is in self-identification. The Gallup Organization has detected a slight movement away from moderation: in 2003 41 percent of American voters said they were conservative, up from 37 percent in 2000, while moderates dropped from 42 percent to 39 percent and liberals were virtually unchanged at 19 to 20 percent. Interestingly, the John Locke Foundation’s “Agenda” poll shows a similar trend within North Carolina: conservatives rose from 35 percent in 1998 to 39 percent in 2002, while moderates dropped from 41 percent to 39 percent and liberals ticked up from 18 percent to 20 percent.
Don’t worry: there are still enough swing votes to tip any given election. And if, in 2004, some red or blue states decide to tiptoe across the color line to follow their latest infatuation, the political scientists and journalists will rethink all of this and come up with a new gimmick – and I’ll probably put their new chart on my wall, too.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.