Interesting analysis from NBC’s Chuck Todd.
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It’s no secret that American politics has become increasingly – and maybe, irreversibly – polarized.
As Meet the Press host Chuck Todd puts it:
Polarization is no longer just polluting the system — it’s paralyzing it.
The deepening divide between the right and the left has largely hollowed out the center of American politics.
Gone are the politicians who once occupied the large “middle” and the voters who once gravitated to them.
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The Pew Research Center has tracked party identity and ideology for decades.
One way they do it is by scoring the Republicans and Democrats on a 10-item scale of political values.
Here’s where we stand today:
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What the chart means …
Democrats cluster to the left, Republicans cluster to the right.
There is less than 10% in each party leaning ideologically to the left (or right) of the other party’s median.
That’s where we are today.
How did we get here?
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Let’s add some historical perspective …
10 years ago, there was a divide, too, but the distance between the peaks was relatively small.
Put another way…
In 1994,a couple of years into the Clinton presidency, Pew found that 36 percent of Republicans were more liberal than the median Democrat … and 30% of Democrats were actually more conservative than the median Republican.
The blue and res curves pretty much blended together … with a big clump of folks in the center.
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Then came the Bush years.
Many pundits claim that Bush forged the great divide.
But, the facts are to the contrary.
By midway through the Bush presidency, the ideological peaks had converged even closer.
The biggest area of the chart is the dark blue section … which indicates the a very middle of-the road America.
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Now, let’s advance the calendar and look again at 2014.
By the 6th year of the Obama presidency, each side moved further to their extremes .
Less than 10 percent in each party overlapped ideologically with the other side.
That’s where we are now.
![clip_image002[1]](https://kenhoma.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/clip_image00211.jpg "clip_image002[1]")
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Todd’s coclusion
Todd observes the shifts but is silent on the obvious: the great polarization has emerged under a self-proclaimed “great unifier”.
Rather than ascribing any responsibility to former President Obama, Todd lays the fault on “big data” and its impact on political strategies.
That’s a stretch …
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August 21, 2017 at 1:14 pm |
Chuck Todd is an ideological leftest and like most Democrats can’t ascribe any fault to the “great unifier” – or his would have been successor HRC. The left has become unhinged since Trump became president – more hate, violence, intolerance, ignorant susceptibility to the corrupt MSM, shout downs on college campuses (Middlebury, my Alma Mater, is a case in point) – all because Trump beat out their anointed queen. As someone noted the other day: “If Trump walked on water – they’d say it was because he couldn’t swim.”
God knows where this ends, but I pray that Trump prevails. MAGA from a proud Deplorable!
August 21, 2017 at 4:54 pm |
My $0.02 – this chart is highly correlated with the rise of social media and proliferation of media outlets in general (some of which are indeed fake).
We pretty much live in echo chambers of ideas that reinforce our existing world views. We’re losing any sense of a shared reality and that’s scary.
August 22, 2017 at 8:43 am |
@Cirrito – Spot on analysis. As a nation, we are in big trouble.