The Big Sort (5 page)

Gerrymandering is a convenient—and popular
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—explanation because it does conform to an objective reality. Every ten years, legislators do, in fact, redraw districts, and an ever-increasing number of those districts are becoming more ideologically lopsided. Gerrymandering also has science behind it. Legislators use "powerful computers," which make the process nefariously exact. In addition, the gerrymandering thesis has "bad guys"—better than bad guys, really; it has politicians. Elected officials, not moderate-loving voters, have caused the problem and deserve the blame.

It's certainly true that congressional districts have grown largely uncontested. Even in the middle of an unpopular war, 90 percent of incumbent members of Congress were reelected in 2006, and although the number of competitive races increased, only 66 out of 435 House races were at all close.
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And it's true that House districts, on average, have grown overwhelmingly either Democratic or Republican since the 1970s. By 2004, nearly half the members of Congress came from districts that had unassailable majorities. The question, however, is whether the increase in ideologically pure districts was caused by redistricting.

There are several arguments against the gerrymandering thesis. The first is that political parties aren't in the business of building supermajorities for incumbents. Parties exist to maximize their number of representatives. This imperative causes parties to spread votes around, creating more districts with, say, 10- to 15-point majorities and fewer with lopsided constituencies. Studies of redistricting have found that, indeed, "partisan redistricting often has the effect of reducing the safety of incumbents."
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The results of the 2006 midterm elections provided some evidence that Republicans lost races not because they had been making seats safer, but because they had spread their majorities a wee bit thin. In Pennsylvania, Democrats targeted districts where Republican margins had been shaved through redistricting and narrowly picked up three seats. "If Republicans had been a little less aggressive (in redistricting), they could have won several of those seats," Nathaniel Persily, a redistricting specialist at the University of Pennsylvania told the
Wall Street Journal.
"If they gave the Democrats one more seat, they could have shored up by several percentage points the other seats."
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It doesn't appear that redistricting caused much, if any, of the increase in homogeneous districts. After all, if gerrymandering created landslide districts, you'd expect to see an increase in noncompetitive districts immediately after redistricting. Legislatures would draw new districts after the census and, bing-bang, there would be fewer competitive districts. That didn't happen. After each of the last three redistricting cycles (1980, 1990, and 2000), there were no immediate jumps in lopsided districts. When Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz examined the effects of redistricting in 2000, he found that the number of supersafe House seats (those with presidential vote margins of more than 20 percent) had increased by two, from 201 to 203. That's hardly a sign of much horseplay. Abramowitz found similar small effects after redistricting in the 1980s and 1990s. (After redistricting in 1980, in fact, the number of noncompetitive districts slightly decreased.) If legislative gerrymandering had caused the lopsided House, its effects certainly had been subtle, or perhaps one should say "prescient." For the districts hadn't grown more partisan at the
time
of redistricting, Abramowitz found. They had grown more partisan later, in the years between redistricting, when the districts' boundaries remained unchanged. From the first post-redistricting election in 1992 until 2000, the number of ideologically lopsided districts jumped from 156 to 201, but not a single district changed shape in those years.
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Vanderbilt University's Bruce Oppenheimer looked at this phenomenon in another way. There are seven states with only one member of Congress. Five are red (Alaska, Montana, the Dakotas, and Wyoming), and two are blue (Delaware and Vermont). But none have had their legislative boundaries gerrymandered. Oppenheimer cobbled these seven districts into a single, hypothetical "state." He compared this seven-district "state-of-states" with twenty-six actual states with a similar number of districts in three very close presidential elections: 1960, 1976, and 2000. Oppenheimer checked to see which had become more lopsided, the made-up state-of-states with the static borders or the real states where politicians and their infernal computers had gerrymandered to their hearts' content.

Between 1960 and 2000, no real-life state saw partisan vote margins in its congressional districts increase more than in Oppenheimer's hypothetical state-of-states. Manipulative politicians in the twenty-six states had four chances to make their congressional districts less competitive, but even so the districts didn't match the lopsidedness that appeared naturally in the state-of-states.
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"These data raise doubts about the ability of redistricting schemes to explain the decline in the underlying party competitiveness of congressional districts," Oppenheimer wrote.
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If not gerrymandering, then how about conspiracy? Democrats have argued that the elections of 2000 and 2004—and the concurrent polarization of the nation's politics—were the culmination of a forty-year effort by Republicans. The story goes like this: In the wake of the Barry Goldwater defeat in 1964, Republicans devised a grand scheme. They built a tightly wound, highly coordinated movement from the top down. Corporations and foundations paid for think tanks and advocacy groups, which supplied the movement with ideas and leaders. The right created its own media—talk radio, Christian television networks, and conservative-minded college newspapers—in this centrally managed, ma-chinelike plot to split the country ideologically and then establish a permanent majority. The result of this multigenerational effort lay in the Republicans' congressional victory in 1994 and the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.

Certainly, the conservatives wanted to take over. Winning, after all, is one goal in politics. But a conspiracy? One piece of evidence used to support the existence of this far-sighted plan is a 1971 memo written by Lewis Powell, the soon-to-be-appointed Supreme Court justice. Powell, writing to a friend with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, warned of an "attack" on the "free enterprise system." In the early years of the George W. Bush administration, liberals unearthed this obscure manuscript and gave it nearly mythic significance. Former Democratic senator Bill Bradley described Powell's note (in what surely is an oxymoron) as a "landmark memo." The right had used the memo, Bradley wrote, as a "blueprint" to construct a "pyramid" of foundations, think tanks, and advocacy groups, all designed to support an interchangeable Republican leader.
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Pick—or mix!—your metaphor of all-embracing power.
Harper's Magazine
editor Lewis Lapham described the "Republican propaganda mill" as "tentacles of rage." He transformed Powell's memo into a "manifesto" that held for the political right the "hope of their salvation." According to Lapham, Powell's "heavy word of warning fell upon the legions of reaction with the force of Holy Scripture."
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Skipping several generations, the bloggers Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga wrote in 2006 that the Powell memo "eventually helped fuel nascent efforts to create the most sophisticated, well-funded political propaganda machine in world history," Joseph Goebbels notwithstanding.
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The belief on the left is that the machine (or mill or pyramid or giant squid) built of foundations, radio programs, and organizations powered the Republican comeback. The right-wing mechanism paid for scholars' sharp pencils and book contracts. Young leaders were fledged through summer camps, internships, and jobs with Republican congressional representatives until they could become self-supporting members of the movement. The right established a shadow society that built, grew, and eventually took over in the name of religion and free enterprise. And the entire operation was funded by the businesses that had suffered at the hands of Democratic government.

Mark Schmitt, the former director of policy at the liberal Open Society Institute, called this phenomenon the "legend of the Powell memo."
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He found few historians of the conservative movement who even mention the memo. For example, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's chronicle
The Right Nation
gives the Powell memo exactly three sentences.
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Moreover, Schmitt wrote, Powell was "far out of touch" with what would become the New Right.
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The memo was given an iconic status by liberals searching for some explanation of their minority standing in national politics. (Conspiracy was a more appealing theory than a simple lack of popular support.) Best of all, this explanation was duplicable: the left could write its own Powell memo and create its own matrix of foundations, think tanks, and leadership programs. (James Piereson, executive director of the conservative, and now defunct, Olin Foundation, observed that the left had a "near-obsessive interest in conservative philanthropies."
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) Schmitt contended that the "reality of the right is that there was no plan, just a lot of people writing their own memos and starting their own organizations—some succeeding, some failing, false starts, mergers, lots of money well spent, and lots of money wasted."
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There is some truth to the conspiracy stories. Republicans schemed and conservatives talked of creating a "shadow society"; they set up alternative foundations, research groups, and media outlets. Of course, Democrats schemed, too, and the left had its own support in the foundation world. But conservatives better understood the changes taking place in the country, and that is why, for a time, Republicans were more successful politically. Republicans didn't create a movement. They recognized the cultural shifts taking place across the country—the Big Sort—and then channeled what was happening into politics, to their advantage.

What both gerrymandering and the forty-year conservative conspiracy arguments miss is that politics is a two-way street. It flows both from the top down and from the bottom up. Most explanations for our current partisanship—gerrymandering and conspiracy are two good examples—are top-down only. They assume that public opinion follows the lead of presidents, politicians, and Capitol Hill journalists. In this worldview, elites (be they elected officials, media barons, or a cabal of well-funded Republicans) use the power of money or position to push society in a particular direction. Voters are largely powerless in this process. They just choose one of the alternatives that legislative manipulation, media bias, and party propaganda provide.

But politics is bottom-up as well. Society changes and politicians follow. The Big Sort is the story of real differences in the way people think, in what they value, in how they worship, and finally in where they live. The divisions in Congress aren't simply the consequence of manipulations by left-wing interest groups or the outcome of plots hatched in a bunker deep under the Heritage Foundation. The divisions are the reflection of how—and where—people have come to reside.

A less conspiratorial explanation for why national politics has grown more partisan over the past thirty years can be found in the studies of congressional redistricting. Alan Abramowitz and Bruce Oppenheimer looked at the evidence of increasing geographic polarization we first presented in the
Austin American-Statesman
in 2002 and 2004, and they came to the same conclusion: people have been sorting. Abramowitz: "Americans are increasingly living in communities and neighborhoods whose residents share their values and they are increasingly voting for candidates who reflect those values."
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Oppenheimer: "A final theory that I offer to explain the decline in partisan competitiveness at the congressional district level rests on the increased mobility of Americans and the corresponding growth in the freedom to select where they will reside."
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The overwhelming attention given to political celebrity—and political conspiracy—in our time has obscured the politics of place. If people simply respond to the faults, successes, and foibles of political elites, then it really doesn't matter that people are taking up residence in increasingly homogeneous neighborhoods. But politically like-minded regions practice a different kind of politics than do places with a greater mix of allegiances. Our politics are affected by our neighbors. Following is one example.

In the early 1960s, political scientist John Fenton wondered why working-class voters in Ohio supported Republicans, a political act that was against their economic interests. Fenton explained this phenomenon by looking at the shape of the state's neighborhoods. Upper-class voters lived in tightly knit, geographically compact communities. Physical proximity made it easier for them to maintain political cohesion, to move and vote in an ideological herd. In Ohio's large number of midsize cities, however, there was no corresponding critical mass of workers. Working-class voters were dispersed. "In Ohio you had a fairly even distribution of these working-class voters across the state," explained the University of Maryland's James Gimpel. "And because they lived among farmers and clerks and ditch diggers, they were not as inclined to vote so monolithically."
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In nearby Michigan, Gimpel said, working-class voters lived close to one another, and their geographic proximity powered their ideological and political intensity. In Ohio, however, workers were spread out, and the effect of this diffusion, Fenton wrote more than forty years ago, was "profound ... The postman did not talk the same language as his accountant neighbor, and the accountant was in a different world from the skilled workman at Timken Roller Bearing who lived across the street. Thus, conversation between them usually took the form of monosyllabic grunts about the weather ... The disunity of unions and the Democratic party in Ohio was a faithful reflection of the social disorganization of their members."
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