3Winter 2005

Divided We Stand:The Polarizing of American PoliticsA recent Zogby poll found that 70 percent ofAmericans believe the Democratic and Republicanparties should both be broad-based and pursue com-promise rather than polarization. The same pollfound that a solid majority believe the two parties aretoo focused on their respective base voters and thatas a result compromise has become impossible inWashington, D.C. Looking at recent partisan battlesover Social Security, presidential appointments, TerrySchiavo, the culture war, the Iraq war, and more, onecan understand why so many Americans hold theseviews. There appears to be no end in sight to thisbare-knuckles partisanship that substitutes for poli-tics today. Amid all the reporting on the partisanwars, however, what has been missing is recognitionof how extreme positions on political issues are incit-ed by certain fundamental realities of our nation andour political system. Consequently it will be difficultto change without dealing with these root causes.The first reality is simply demographics: where peo-ple live, and how partisan demographics have beenlining up in recent years along regional lines. Theinfamous USA Today map showing the divisionbetween “red” and “blue” America only begins toencapsulate the consequences of this recent trend.

The second fundamental reality is how those region-al partisan demographics are funneled as votesthrough our winner-take-all electoral system. Theelectoral process of choosing our representatives onewinner-take-all district at a time is carving ournation into red and blue one-party fiefdoms. Giventhe regional partisan demographics, in 90 percent oflegislative districts at the federal and state levels it’spossible for only one side to win because there aresimply too many voters of one type packed into thatdistrict. (This effect is occurring outside whatevershenanigans take place as a result of partisan gerry-manders during the redistricting process.)

In combination, these two are greatly contributing tothe toxic brew that we know today as partisan poli-tics. This essay explores the subtleties and ramifica-tions of these phenomena in greater detail and makespredictions for the future of American politics.

Winner-Take-All Is Making Most of Us Losers

Under our winner-take-all rules, we elect one districtrepresentative at a time. Whichever party’s candi-date has the most votes wins, and all other partiesand their candidates lose. Hence, the term “winner-take-all,” because one side wins all the representa-tion while everyone else wins nothing. Of course,this is how our system has operated for a long time,but over the last fifteen years something new hasbegun to occur. In particular, three factors arechanging the course of politics.

First, in this era of red versus blue America, thenation has begun to balkanize along regional lineswith deep partisan divisions. Like other large winner-take-all democracies, such as India and Canada,entire regions of the United States have become one-party fiefdoms. The Democrats control the cities,most of the coasts, and sizable chunks of theMidwest, while the GOP dominates rural areas andmost of the fly-over zones between the coasts. Onthe other’s turf, it is difficult for the minority partyto win any elections, leading to not only loss ofpolitical competition but even minimal debate ofimportant issues.

Note that this is not the result of partisan gerry-mandering during the redistricting process, whichsome observers cite as an explanation for the lack ofpolitical competition. No, this is something differentin which partisan residential patterns—where peo-ple live—are outstripping the ability of the map-makers to greatly affect the outcome of elections.

B Y S T E V E N H I L L

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Each legislative district, whether at the federal or thestate level, has been branded Republican red orDemocrat blue before a single vote is even cast, orbefore the partisan line drawers sit down at theircomputers, purely on the basis of where people live.

Note too that this phenomenon is not happeninguniformly in every state. Certainly in states such asTexas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan,partisan gerrymanders have affected election resultssince 2001. But in most other states, even Arizona,Iowa, Washington, and others that employ an inde-pendent redistricting commission of one sort oranother, regional partisan demographics havebedeviled any attempts to create more competitiveelections. In most states, it turns out, demographyhas become destiny.

If the country is now politically balkanized alongregional lines, this raises the question of whether ornot American voters themselves are also polarizedinto partisan camps. The answer, perplexingly, is yesand no, which leads us to our second significantchange over the last fifteen years.

The University of Michigan’s National ElectionStudies (NES), a series of public opinion polls takenover the last three decades, gives an interesting snap-shot of political attitudes since the early 1970s.David King’s analysis in “The Polarization ofAmerican Political Parties and Mistrust ofGovernment” shows that for a whole host of ques-tions—among them abortion, government interven-tion in the economy, the size of government, theamount of services government ought to provide,affirmative action, the desirability of a nationalhealth plan, and others—the general public has

barely budged in its attitude, except in two of theseareas, where Americans indeed have become moresplit since the mid-1980s. The first is over govern-ment spending, where more Americans today areopposed to big government and higher taxes; andthe second is over government aid to AfricanAmericans and minorities—that is, affirmativeaction—with more Americans today opposed thanpreviously. In the public mind, these two are closelyfused, one-half of the NES respondents now agreethat “the government should not make any specialeffort to help blacks because they should help them-selves,” which figure is up from one-third of thepopulation in 1984.

A brief outline of American electoral history for thepast thirty-five years reveals how these two interre-lated domains strongly reflect the degree to whichnational politics and partisan competition havebecome centered around appeals to culturally andracially conservative white voters, who still make upthe bulk of the American electorate. This attitudinalshift once formed the basis of Richard Nixon’s suc-cessful “Southern strategy” in the early 1970s,which used coded words and symbolic gestures andactions directed at white people in the South, partic-ularly white men, to paint the Democrats as theparty of racial minorities, rioting cities, and a civilrights agenda. Ronald Reagan continued the Nixonstrategy, peeling off white Democrats, particularly inthe South, with his attacks on race-based policies,government spending, and stereotyping of cities.President George H. W. Bush used his infamousWillie Horton ads and coded language to fingerMichael Dukakis and the Democrats as the party ofliberals and big spending and, again, as being soft oncrime (that is, racial minorities). New DemocratClinton hoisted his finger in the air and, taking noteof the political winds, tried to expropriate parts ofthe GOP strategy by taking a public stance that dis-tanced the Democratic Party from the racial tag,with high-profile dissings of rapper Sister Souljahand the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Even today, much of cur-rent U.S. politics still can be explained by the

A solid majority believe the two parties are toofocused on their respective base voters and as aresult compromise has become impossible inWashington, D.C.

5Winter 2005

dynamics unleashed during this not-so-distant eraby Nixon’s tactics.

So the situation we are left with is this: along twokey axes, that of big government and higher taxeson the one hand, government-sponsored race-basedaffirmative action programs on the other, the publicindeed has become more polarized. And more con-servative, prompting the GOP to aggressivelyexploit this shift. Add to this picture recent GOPattacks targeted on cultural issues such as gay rights,abortion, prayer in the classroom, the Terry Schiavocase, and more, and you have the major axes uponwhich American politics turns today. (Although thecultural issues are not necessarily reflective of a shiftin American attitudes, Americans have always beenqueasy about gay marriage, and overall Americansshow little shift in attitude toward abortion. Whatall this reflects is a newfound willingness on the partof the GOP in this era of the forty-nine–to-forty-nine nation, the Red vs. Blue America, to exploitthese issues in an effort to mobilize their base.)

The third significant change over the last fifteenyears, inextricably linked to the previous two, is thedecrease in ticket splitting among voters. It was oncecommon for voters to choose, say, a Republican forpresident and a Democrat for Congress. Fordecades, Southern white voters would pick aRepublican such as Nixon for president but aSouthern Democrat such as Sam Nunn for Senate orSam Ervin for the House; Montanans would votefor Ronald Reagan as well as Democrat MajorityLeader Mike Mansfield for U.S. Senate. But thatdoesn’t happen as much anymore; voters havebecome extremely predictable in their voting pat-terns—by region, by office, and by party.Republican voters are not likely to vote for aDemocratic candidate these days, no matter howdissatisfied they may be with the Republican candi-date, or vice versa. The two sides are moreintractably far apart than ever, with a smaller pro-portion of voters straddling the middle between thetwo parties.

Polarize, Not Compromise

This tidal shift regarding the three factors of (1)regional partisan balkanization, (2) voters’ moreconservative attitudes about big government andracial programs, and (3) an increase in voter consis-tency along partisan lines (a decrease in ticket split-ting)—and all of this expressed as votes through thewinner-take-all electoral system—has given rise inrecent years to an audacious GOP strategy. It can besummed up as “polarize, not compromise.” Ratherthan engaging in Bill Clinton–like triangulation inwhich candidates step to the middle to woo swingvoters—supposedly one of the moderating influ-ences of our winner-take-all system—theRepublicans have figured something out: in awinner-take-all system, they don’t need to wineverybody’s vote; they just need one more vote thantheir opponent. Sometimes they can increase theirvote total more easily by mobilizing a bigger chunkof their base voters than by bending over backwardsto woo undecided swing voters (as long as the effortto mobilize their base does not alienate too manyswing voters).

The winner-take-all system is reminiscent of the jokeabout two hikers walking in the woods who suddenlyencounter a hungry bear. The bear growls. One of thehikers calmly bends down and reties her shoe. Theother hiker, quite agitated, says: “What are you doing?We gotta get out of here; we have to outrun thatbear!” To which the other hiker calmly replies, “No, Idon’t, I just have to outrun you!” and then jumps upand dashes off, leaving her companion in the dust.

So too with a winner-take-all system: you just haveto be the last one standing. And with the forty-nine–forty-nine nation, with red and blue America soevenly divided, a political party can do that either by

The Republicans have figured out that they don’tneed to win everybody’s vote; they just need onemore vote than their opponent.

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mobilizing more of their base voters or by convinc-ing undecided swing voters. Or a bit of both, so longas the attempt to mobilize more base voters does notalienate its swing voters, or vice versa. Compared toeven five years ago, GOP leaders have clearlyembarked on a strategy that relies more on mobiliz-ing their base voters, as opposed to Clintonian trian-gulation in which Democrats in the 1990s tried tocapture undecided swing voters (“soccer moms” and“NASCAR dads,” for example) by co-opting certainRepublican policies. The GOP attempted a bit of thatswing voter serenade in the late 1990s with their rela-beling of George W. Bush as a “compassionate con-servative.” But increasingly the GOP strategy seemsto be to mobilize its base. Hence, the incentives noware to polarize, to sharpen the differences betweenthe parties, rather than compromise since that mightblur those differences. In this new era, this is the wayto win elections, figure the GOP strategists. Theirstrategy seems to be paying off.

So the incentives to compromise, supposedly anadvantage of our winner-take-all system, are large-ly missing in action at this point. It is the winner-take-all system itself that is exacerbating theproblem, because given regional partisan demo-graphics it allows the electoral map to be easilycarved up into solidly red or blue legislative dis-tricts, or in a presidential election into solidly redor blue states. Party strategists can then target theirresources to the handful of districts or states wherethere is likely to be a close race. But there are fewerand fewer of these up-for-grabs swing districts andstates in recent years. In the 2004 elections therewere perhaps 30 out of 435 House seats—less than7 percent—considered competitive, and perhaps adozen swing states out of fifty in the presidentialrace (though many pundits, including myself, weresaying six months before the election that JohnKerry would win if he captured either Ohio orFlorida, meaning an effective battleground of twostates). Of more than seven thousand state legisla-tive races, 40 percent had no candidate from one ofthe two major parties because the district was con-

sidered a waste of time and resources for theminority party. That’s two out of five races forwhich there was not even nominal competition, orany campaigning or debate of ideas, to interest vot-ers. Most of the remaining races were won by alandslide.

In this kind of political landscape, the strategy ofpolarize, not compromise makes perfect sense. It isfollowing the logical trajectory of the incentives of awinner-take-all system, given the regional partisandemographics in Red vs. Blue America, voters’ moreconservative attitude toward government spendingand taxes, and the increase in voters’ partisan con-sistency.

Will the Democrats Begin Mimicking GOP Strategy?

Over the years, Democrats and Republicans havebeen notorious in ripping off one another’s success-ful tactics and issues in their bid to win elections. BillClinton was a master at co-opting Republican issuesas a way to win votes. Republican strategists sooncaught on to the tactic of soft money ads brilliantlyadvanced by Clinton and his consultant Dick Morrisin the mid-1990s. Will the Democrats similarly fol-low the Republicans in adopting the tactic of polar-ize, not compromise?

Certainly there has been discussion of this sort with-in Democratic Party circles. Trends of this sort havebeen floated as one reason a polarizing candidate onthe Democratic side such as Hillary RodhamClinton actually might beat a Republican candidatesuch as John McCain or Rudy Giuliani. However,there are striking demographic differences betweenthe GOP base and the Democratic Party base thatmake it unlikely the Democrats can succeed by sim-ply copying the GOP strategy.

Striking demographic differences make it unlikelythe Democrats can succeed by simply copying theGOP strategy.

7Winter 2005

For starters, the Democrats’ base is more complicat-ed than the GOP base. The former is largely com-posed of a diverse array of minorities, young people,and unions who want the government to lend ahelping hand, whether for affirmative action, lowertuition, health care and pensions, greater regulatoryenforcement, or any of a host of other ways that canbe realized only by an activist government. All ofthem mean government programs, which meansgovernment spending, which equates in many peo-ple’s minds to higher taxes.

But this desire conflicts with the Democrats’ need tonot alienate and lose swing voters in their bid tomobilize their base. Swing voters tend to be morefiscally conservative and not very welcoming ofhigher taxes or more government spending. Theyare part of the group of Reagan Democrats that BillClinton tried to woo back with his pronouncementsin the early and mid-1990s along the lines of “theera of big government is over.” Thus the Democraticattempt to motivate their base conflicts with theirneed to not alienate swing voters in the process.

Republicans, on the other hand, can motivate theirbase with an infinite array of cultural and religiousissues, whether the conflict over Terry Schiavo, gaymarriage, abortion, or school prayer. Issues of thissort cost relatively nothing in terms of governmenttaxes or programs, and consequently they don’talienate fiscally conservative swing voters. Thesepeople may not completely agree with Republicanleadership on cultural matters, but the disagreementdoes not greatly motivate their voting choices theway that higher taxes do.

An integral part of this GOP strategy is keen aware-ness of the intensity with which voters hold a par-ticular belief, or agree or disagree with a particularissue. As key GOP strategist and NRA board mem-ber Grover Norquist has suggested in the past, thequestion is intensity. A certain percentage will saythey are in favor of a particular issue, but will theyvote on that basis?

Intensity versus preference is a cornerstone conceptthat many pundits and political analysts on theDemocratic Party side seem to ignore or not under-stand. The fact is, fiscally conservative swing votersmay roll their eyes at the extremes of the RepublicanParty and their ploys to throw red meat to theirparty base, but that does not decide their vote theway higher taxes and distaste for big governmentdo. They will vote against a John Kerry, pegged as aliberal from Massachusetts, because they do nottrust him in terms of the federal budget, spendingpriorities, taxes, or minority programs, regardless ofhow nutty the wings of the Republican Party act.Although the NES study reveals that Americans’attitudes have changed little on most issues and top-ics, the areas where they have changed and becomemore polarized—on big government and highertaxes, and minority programs—tend to have pro-duced intensely held viewpoints that are predictiveof their voting preferences.

So in this gambit the Republicans have the advan-tage, at least for the foreseeable future, becausewhen it comes to the all-important issues of biggovernment and higher taxes and minority pro-grams the GOP base has an attitude more similarto that of swing voters than the Democrats’ basehas. The Republicans enjoy a bridge between theirbase and swing voters that the Democrats do nothave access to. At some point the Republicans runthe risk of going too far in motivating their base,risking the type of backlash seen in the early 1990swith the antics of cultural conservatives such as PatBuchanan and Marilyn Quayle on national TV atthe 1992 Republican National Convention. Thatbacklash pushed enough swing voters over to thenew kid from Arkansas who kept saying, “It’s theeconomy, stupid.” But that was thirteen years ago,when the trends I am identifying were not so faralong. Also, Republican strategists have learned alot since then about public relations and messag-ing. The Pat Buchanans don’t make it to the micro-phone anymore, at least not during the nationalconvention.

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Also, say what you want about George W. Bush buthe has proven to be extremely adept at appearing asa “compassionate conservative” for a national TVaudience, though when the cameras aren’t payingclose attention at private meetings and GOP rallieshe can talk like a fundamentalist preacher or cozyfriend of the rich. The GOP has become extremelysophisticated at such targeting techniques, and thishas allowed them to mobilize their base while notgreatly alienating either a national audience or fis-cally conservative swing voters.

Republican strategists have become very profession-al at using these divisive winner-take-all tactics towin elections, and they are quite comfortable withwinning by only one more vote than the opposition.The Democrats have been caught flat-footed, withlittle capacity to respond, in large part because thedynamics of winner-take-all elections combinedwith regional partisan demographics and voters’more conservative attitudes regarding big govern-ment and taxes and minority programs put them ata decided disadvantage.

Given that the tactic of polarize, not compromise isworking so well for Republicans, we can expectmore partisan division and little compromise in theyears ahead. We can expect more polarization, moreBalkanization, which is odd because this is not whatthe political science textbooks taught us that thewinner-take-all electoral system is supposed to pro-duce. Winner-take-all is supposed to produce mod-eration, centrism, and compromise. Yet anyonelooking at American politics in recent years can seethis is not the case. What happened? Could it be thatthe textbooks were wrong?

Faulty Textbooks: The Strip Mining of AnthonyDowns’s Economic Theory of Democracy

Anthony Downs’s heralded Economic Theory ofDemocracy is a seminal work (based on his 1957article “An Economic Theory of Political Action ina Democracy”). The book is often cited by the cap-tains of American democracy as one of the theoreti-

cal underpinnings for the political centrism andmoderation allegedly resulting from the Americansystem. Downs, an economist, used game theoryand spatial equilibrium models to say some interest-ing things about competition in a winner-take-all,two-party system.

According to the Downs theory, a two-choice, two-party system—(considered a relative proxy for awinner-take-all electoral system, which tends to fos-ter two major parties)—causes the parties to movetoward the two ideological points where the mostvoters are amassed. Of particular interest to Downswere two specific voter distributions: one wheremost voters are amassed at the ideological center, themedian middle (illustrated by a one-humped curve);and one where voters are polarized into two ideo-logical camps to the right and left of the center (atwo-humped curve).

In the first instance, Downs posited that, given avoter distribution where most voters are amassed atthe middle of any particular political spectrum, thetwo political parties—because they are vote maxi-mizers—tend to converge in the center where mostof the electorate is concentrated. Both parties tendto adopt the views of what is called the “median”voter, the person closest to the middle of the politi-cal spectrum. This is because the strategic incentivesfor the two parties, and the rational choices for vot-ers picking the best of what’s available in a limitedtwo-choice field, act together to impart victory onthe party that is closer to the median. A party thatfails to converge to the median can always bedefeated by a party that does (with one importantaddendum: fear of losing their own extremist voterskeeps the two parties from drifting completely tothe median center, or “becoming identical”).

Thus, according to this Downsian model, what hasbeen called the “tweedle dee or tweedle dum” choiceof nearly identical Democratic and Republican candi-dates actually is rational behavior on the part of politi-cians trying to win an election in a two-choice field.

9Winter 2005

Given a one-humped distribution of voters amassed inthe middle of the political spectrum, if either politicalparty strays too far toward the margin it yields moreof the political turf to the opponent. So both partieslean toward the middle. This reality has given rise to aclassic political strategy: in the primaries, run to yourbase, but in the general election run to the middle. Theresult is different elections with different median vot-ers, with primaries determined by median voters con-siderably more partisan than in a general election.Certainly Bill Clinton and the “compassionate conser-vative” version of George W. Bush in 2000 masterfullyused such a strategy, and the Downsian spatial equi-librium model purports to tell us why.

But Downs proposed an important exception: what if,he asked, the distribution of voters is not humped inthe middle of the ideological spatial market? What ifinstead the electorate is polarized? In this case, Downsshowed, the two parties “diverge toward the extremesrather than converge on the center. Each gains morevotes by moving toward a radical position than it losesin the center” (p. 143). When the electorate is polar-ized, Downs’s model portrays the distribution of vot-ers as two-humps, equal in size, like a Bactrian camel’sback. In such a situation, Downs goes on to predictthat “regardless of which party is in office, half theelectorate always feels that the other half is imposingpolicies upon it that are strongly repugnant to it.”(This prediction should sound familiar to manydiehard supporters of both the Democrats andRepublicans today, who are convinced that the otherside is tantamount to evil.) But in addition, Downswrote, “In this situation, if one party keeps gettingreelected, the disgruntled supporters of the other partywill probably revolt; whereas if the two parties alter-nate in office, social chaos occurs, because governmentpolicy keeps changing from one extreme to the other.”Thus, Downs concluded, the two party system “doesnot lead to effective, stable government when the elec-torate is polarized” (p. 143).

Downs’s work was enormously influential over theensuing decades. His rational-choice formulation of

politics permeated the academy, and even theculture-at-large. The pandemonium known as poli-tics had been modeled and reduced to “natural law,”just like economics or physics, in a way that seemedto make sense out of the chaos. It is hardly possibleto overstate the influence of Downsian theory, citedand recited by political scientists, judges, journalists,pundits, politicians, and editors. Testifying to itsenduring clout, a search of Downs’s EconomicTheory of Democracy in the Social Science CitationIndex turns up more than one thousand entries inthe 1990s alone.

But in the four decades following Downs’s seminalwork, various neo-Downsian editors, pundits andpoliticos, and even researchers in the academy selec-tively strip-mined Downs for their own purposes.Interpretation of the Downs model ignored whatapparently did not fit their preferred vision ofAmerica as a nicely organized, single-humped elec-torate. Thus, Downs’s formulation of what happensto a democracy when the electorate is polarized intotwo voter distribution humps somehow was left onthe cutting room floor.

What remained was a half-baked simulacrum of theDowns theory, and the two-party system transmo-grified in many minds into a proxy for moderate,majoritarian, centrist government. Downs’s medianvoter acquired a reputation as a political moderate,and even more as an undecided (swing) voter. Thepolicy passed by that government was presumed tobe preferred by the majority of voters. Centrist gov-ernment had been more or less achieved, at least the-oretically according to the neo-Downsians, andunsurprisingly it looked quite a lot like two-partygovernment in the United States.

Anthony Downs concluded that even by alternatingterms in office, the two party system “does notlead to effective, stable government when theelectorate is polarized.”

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But this was certainly a misreading. Downs himselfpostulated an important exception: when a polarizedelectorate leads to a more difficult brand of democ-racy. For Downs, the behavior of vote-maximizingparties was determined by the distribution of voters,not vice versa. One strength of Downs’s model is thatit was flexible and examined the reaction of politicalparties pursuing votes from different voter distribu-tions. Yet an unsubstantiated assumption crept intothe neo-Downsians’ revisions of the model, from theperspective of policy determination: like a kind ofpolitical conveyor belt, the two-choice dynamic, inthe aggregate, was presumed to drag both partiesinevitably to centrist positions of moderation, lead-ing to a politically centrist, moderate, majoritariangovernment—regardless of the distribution of voters.

The polarized-electorate exception was inexplicablydropped from the neo-Downsian canon, but politicsin the real world is not always cooperative or kindto those who try to bend theory to their will. Theoutstanding question was, Which distribution ofvoters was applicable to American politics? The one-humped majority of voters amassed around theideological median middle? Or a two-humpedpolarized distribution of voters? Or perhaps a distri-bution somewhere between the two extremes, orone that fluctuated between the two extremes overtime? There was a one-hump versus two-humpuncertainty to figure out. Only after answering thequestion could anyone begin to speculate whetherthe politics of policy making would lead to modera-tion and centrism, or polarization and paralysis.

When USA Today’s Red vs. Blue America map wasfirst published following the 2000 presidential elec-tion, for many political observers—(particularlythose honestly and soberly contemplating theDownsian model)—the map of the national votecaused the hair on their neck to rise, preciselybecause of what it conveyed: a national two-humpdistribution of polarized voters, cleaved along stark-ly regional lines. It was like some sort of two-humped Godzilla monster, rising up out of the sea.

But the same two-humped Godzilla appears whenanalyzing congressional elections as well. Politicalscientist Elizabeth DeSouza reevaluated the Downsrational choice theory and some of its most basicassumptions for U.S. House races. In particular, shereevaluated the neo-Downsian notion of the distri-bution of voters, challenging the depiction of themedian voter as a neutral, undecided, or swing voterin congressional elections. DeSouza’s model includ-ed the more real-world condition that most congres-sional districts actually were noncompetitive safeseats, favoring one party or the other by a landslide.In examining House races from 1974 to 1996,DeSouza found a strong link between vote sharesand partisan legislative behavior: the safer the seat,the more partisan the legislator. All other thingsbeing equal, a legislator in a safe district was morelikely to vote a position corresponding to one of theparty’s wings, not the center, compared to a legisla-tor from a competitive district. It is only as voteshares decreased (that is, as races became more com-petitive—fewer and fewer such contests every year)that representatives’ positions gravitated toward thepolitical center.

In the modern era, 70–80 percent of U.S. Houseseats are won by an overwhelming margin and 90percent are won by at least a 10-point victory mar-gin, thanks to natural partisan demographics exac-erbated by partisan gerrymandering that creates ahuge number of safe seats for one party or the other;“very few [House] members will have any incentiveto moderate their positions” (p. 1), and “the logic ofparty convergence collides with the unmistakableparty wars” (p. 2), DeSouza concluded. The over-whelming number of safe seats, as DeSouza pointedout, gave political parties and their candidates “thepolitical equivalent of academic tenure without thetenure process” (p. 3) and produced a lack ofaccountability that in turn produced “the rise of theideologue” (p. 7).

Yet neo-Downsian rational choice models basedexclusively on a single-hump voter distribution pre-

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dicted the opposite pattern. According to the neo-Downsians, the “drive to the center,” toward medi-an voters—toward moderate voters—was a proxyfor a two-choice, winner-take-all system that on thewhole produced centrist political winners andmajoritarian governments of moderation.

One conclusion was glaring: for the past two and ahalf decades, since the mid-1970s at least, Downs’stwo-humped model slowly became the more accu-rate descriptor for most U.S. House races, with onepartisan hump larger than the other, usually drasti-cally so, depending on the district (that is, in a land-slide safe-seat district, which typifies three-quartersof U.S. House races). DeSouza concluded that“rather than having strong incentives for centristpolitics, we have a system that favors partisan poli-tics: politicians are rewarded for staking out extremepositions because most owe their seats to ideologi-cally skewed electorates” (p. 28).

Thus, just as with the national vote revealed by theUSA Today map of the presidential election,Downs’s two-humped model became the operativevoter distribution pattern for most congressionalraces as well. Given the partisan shape of regionaldemographics in red and blue America, combinedwith the dynamics of winner-take-all districts wherethe highest vote getter wins everything and everyother vote getter wins nothing, it should not be sur-prising that the U.S. House has split into two polar-ized camps, a solidly liberal Democratic Party and asolidly conservative Republican Party, like two tec-tonic plates drifting in opposite directions, with adwindling number of moderates between them try-ing to bridge the gap.

Other recent studies and analyses have added fur-ther empirical evidence to the critiques of neo-Downsian dogma on the part of DeSouza andothers, not the least of which is the previously citedNational Election Studies, which reveal a polariza-tion in American attitudes about big governmentand higher taxes and minority programs, with many

voters holding these views so intensely that itbecomes predictive of their voting preferences. Agreat deal of empirical evidence and real-worldbehavior contradict any spatial voter distributionmodels that predict a two-party winner-take-all sys-tem will produce moderate, centrist, or majoritarianpolicy. As Harvard political scientist David King haswritten, “Political scientists may instinctively sus-pect that polarization is an irrational strategy forparty elites running the parties. The party locatingits policy positions closest to the preferences of themedian voter is supposed to get the most votes, or sowe have been taught. With that model in mind, itmakes little sense to allow one’s own party tobecome extreme, but that is precisely what has beenhappening.”

It turns out Downs’s original model, which includ-ed the possibility of a one-humped or a two-humped voter distribution, was exactly right. Butthose who strip-mined the fullness of Downs’s the-ory threw their weight around for decades. Overtime, their half-baked version of their mentor’swork acquired a vast degree of influence. Neo-Downsianism rose to the level of political dogma;indeed it became a kind of priestly orthodoxy. Thedogma trickled down to popular culture; it waschampioned in the mainstream press, inserted intoencyclopedias, and taught in universities and civicsclasses with a kind of nationalist pride, with theWall Street Journal and New York Times acting ashigh priests of the canon. Typical is the claim ofpolitical scientist Paul Rahe, that our two-party sys-tem is built upon compromises between ideologicalfactions and special interests. Even Supreme Courtjustices Scalia and O’Connor, straining in some oftheir opinions to sound erudite, fell back on unsub-stantiated neo-Downsian characterizations.

In the end, Downs’s clever and provocative modeltransmogrified into a stultifying stereotype: every-one knew, it seemed, that the kind of governmentand winner-take-all political system used by theUnited States was the best in the world because it led

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to effective, centrist, stable, majoritarian govern-ment. Those who still swear by winner-take-all’salleged centrism would have us believe that todaywe can have a U.S. House of Representatives that ispopulated by more unabashed liberals and conser-vatives and fewer and fewer moderates, and yetsomehow this two-humped Godzilla monster willfind its way to enact centrist, moderate policy. Itwould be a miracle if such were the case.

Given the partisan bent to regional demographics inred and blue America, combined with more conser-vative voter attitudes about big government andminority programs, combined with a decrease inticket splitting, combined with the dynamics ofwinner-take-all elections where the highest vote get-ter wins everything and every other vote getter winsnothing, polarization makes sense as a winningGOP strategy, contrary to what the neo-Downsianswould have us believe. As our politics fragmentedand polarized, the fuller version of Downs’s model,including the two-humped polarized-electorateexception, would have predicted such fragmentationand the distorted policy that results.

So the neo-Downsian revisionism is in trouble (pre-sumably Downs himself has had to distance himselffrom these misinterpretations of his work; one canimagine him forlornly proclaiming “I am not aDownsian”). Centrist, moderate, majoritarian gov-ernment, it turned out, was not guaranteed at all bya two-party system. In fact, under winner-take-all’stwo-choice, two-party paradigm, it was somewhatof a crapshoot. Observations of national politics inrecent years bear this out.

“Crafted Talk” and “Simulated Responsiveness”

For the two major parties, politics has become atricky balancing act. Both major political parties arecaught between the poles of their base voters on theone hand and undecided, unreliable swing voters onthe other. In the forty-nine–forty-nine nation,whichever political party can sufficiently stimulateboth constituencies wins. An operation of slicing

and dicing various constituencies of voters, simulta-neously one of trial-and-error as well as one ofextreme sophistication with polls and focus groupsdirecting the probes, is now a mainstay of Americanpolitics. I’ve shown how the Republicans have set-tled on a new strategy emphasizing polarizationrather than compromise as a tactic for mobilizingmore of their base (without alienating too much ofthe middle), and why it will be difficult for theDemocrats to mimic this strategy.

But this does not mean that Republican andDemocratic strategists have abandoned theirattempts to woo more centrist voters. On the con-trary, it is necessary to cast a gloss of centrism overtheir extremism, at the very least to prevent theundecided voters from swinging to the other party.This sort of electoral behavior further complicatesthe Downsian model.

In their book Politicians Don’t Pander, political sci-entists Larry Jacobs and Robert Shapiro added afurther challenge to the neo-Downsian notion that“competition for the median voter” would motivateparties and politicians to move to the center. Jacobsand Shapiro were trying to figure out howAmericans could simultaneously hold two contra-dictory beliefs. On the one hand, there is a publicperception that the growing influence of opinionpolls has increased pandering by politicians, and soin one sense increased politicians’ responsiveness tothe public. But on the other hand, there is a percep-tion that the pernicious combination of money inelections and partisanship causes officeholders toignore the wishes of the public in favor of pursuingthe agendas of various special interests. How canboth be true, the researchers wanted to know?

Jacobs and Shapiro discovered the answer in theirconception of “crafted talk” and “simulated respon-siveness.” Politicians indeed rely heavily on opinionpolls, focus groups, and the like; but more impor-tant, the authors showed that politicians use thoseelectoral tools not so much to pander or to be actu-

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ally responsive but instead to find words and phras-es that manipulate and mislead voters, using craftedtalk designed to woo voters by simulating respon-siveness. Using modern campaign technologies torhetorically trick their audience about their allegedcentrism, politicians and political strategists attemptto prevail even when they diverge from the senti-ments of the voting public. Consequently, the parti-san few—party leaders, party activists who hold themost extreme ideological views, and their donors arethe real purveyors of actual policy, and successfulpoliticians and strategists are fully capable of usingcentrist rhetoric to cover up their noncentrist policywhen it suits their purposes. They call themselves“compassionate conservative” and “New Demo-crats” when most of their targeted policies are any-thing but compassionate or new.

Not surprisingly, Jacobs and Shapiro told theWashington Post’s Richard Morin, “We have founda dramatic decline of political responsiveness to thewishes and preferences of the public on major poli-cy decisions.” In fact, they report in their bookPoliticians Don’t Pander that in four social policyareas (social security, health care, welfare, andcrime) Congress in the 1990s was on the same pageas the public only 36 percent of the time, comparedto 67 percent of the time in the late 1980s. This find-ing critically undermines Downs’s model. If therewas one thing fundamental to the entire model, itwas that the behavior of parties and the policies theygravitated toward were completely dependent on thedistribution of voters—whether one-humped ortwo- or three-, and so on. But with a Congress thatis now on the same page with the public only about36 percent of the time, and with the use of craftedtalk and simulated responsiveness developed withthe use of modern campaign techniques to fool vot-ers into thinking that the party is more centrist andmore responsive than it actually is, the connectionwith Downs’s distribution of voters has becomeincreasingly tenuous. The Downsian connection stillexists between median voters and campaign rheto-ric, but under the influence of modern campaign

technologies rhetoric has become divorced from pol-icy. A schism has developed between Downs’s medi-an voter, between what politicians say they will doto attract that voter, and what they actually do oncein office.

Here we arrive at the crux of the dilemma that isutterly undermining any neo-Downsian incentivestoward centrism. It is as if the two political partieshave slickly substituted centrist rhetoric for centristpolicy when it suits them. The Democratic andRepublican parties today, their leaders, candidates,and mad scientist consultants, use modern campaigntechniques such as polling and focus groups to fig-ure out what to say to voters. The sound bites, thecontrived images, the permanent campaign, all ofthese are designed to produce Jacobs and Shapiro’s“crafted talk” and “simulated responsiveness” todupe voters. Hence, the distribution of voterstoday—the very foundation of Downs’s model—isattached to campaign rhetoric but not necessarily topolicy. If there are any Downsian incentives towardcentrist policy, increasingly they are simulated ones.

Thus, contrary to popular and even political sciencestereotypes, when we examine our current politicsfrom both empirical and theoretical angles we seethat winner-take-all need not—indeed, has not—ledto moderate, centrist, stable, or majoritarian gov-ernment or policy. The theorized neo-Downsian cen-trism has been undermined by crafted talk,simulated responsiveness, and modern campaigningtechniques that are used to hoodwink the voters.With the partisan bent of regional demographics inred and blue America, and with the polarization invoter attitudes about big government and minorityprograms revealed by the National Election Studies;

The sound bites, the contrived images, the perma-nent campaign, all of these are designed to pro-duce Jacobs and Shapiro’s “crafted talk” and“simulated responsiveness” to dupe voters.

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with a decrease in ticket splitting so that partisansrather than neutral voters make up the decisive vot-ers in most elections; with all of that expressed viavotes cast in a winner-take-all electoral system thathas produced a fundamental lack of competition inmost lopsided legislative districts and presidentialstates, we end up with a strange brew of nationalpolitics that has become a formula for polarizationand balkanization.

Despite ample opportunity in recent years, there hasbeen little discussion among the national punditryabout how the political mechanics and calculationsof winner-take-all drives such pointlessly adversarialpolitics. But the logic of winner-take-all dictates asingular ambition: that you beat the other side. Thisis instinctual to the winner-take-all mechanism, likea pit bull trained as an attack dog, salivating to goon the offensive. One of the defining characteristicsof winner-take-all is that it promotes adversarialpolitics so that on a whole host of issues it is painful-ly obvious that the overriding agenda for both majorparties is not policy, principle, or ideology but thateach side stake out positions vis-à-vis the other side.Increasingly, Republican strategists and leaders havebet that compromising is a losing strategy, but polar-izing will win elections.

Unfortunately, the soundness of national policy getscaught in the crossfire. A poisoned atmosphere ofpolarization will continue to undercut attempts topursue sound national policy in areas such as SocialSecurity, health care, national security, and the glob-al economy. In all of these areas and more, deformedpolicies have emerged as a result of the trends andincentives identified in this essay, further confusingan already disengaged and disgusted voting publicthat has nowhere else to go but to the sidelines. Asmore and more voters abandon the field, the game is

left to the partisans to wage their battles using thepolitics of polarization, which then fuels a new roundof voter alienation and withdrawal, which in turncedes even more influence to the partisans. It is a raceto the bottom, and the full version of Downsian the-ory predicted this when Anthony Downs wrote thata two party system “does not lead to effective, stablegovernment when the electorate is polarized.” Truerwords have not been spoken in a long, long time.

R E F E R E N C E S

DeSouza, E. M. “When Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dumDisagree: Position-Taking Strategies Under Varying ElectoralConditions.” Unpublished paper prepared for delivery at2000 annual meeting of Western Political ScienceAssociation, University of North Florida.

Downs, A. “An Economic Theory of Political Action in aDemocracy.” Journal of Political Economy, 1957, 65(2),135–150.

Jacobs, L., and Shapiro, R. Politicians Don’t Pander:Political Manipulation and the Loss of DemocraticResponsiveness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

King, D. C. “The Polarization of American Political Partiesand Mistrust of Government.” Harvard University WorkingPaper, 1997. Retrieved Aug. 24, 2005 [www.ksg.harvard.edu/prg/king/polar.htm].

Morin, R. “Unconventional Wisdom: New Facts and HotStats from the Social Sciences.” Washington Post, Mar. 19,2000, p. B5.

Rahe, P. A. “The Electoral College and the Moderation ofthe Political Impulse in America.” In G. L. Gregg (ed.),Securing Democracy: Why We Have an Electoral College.Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2001.

Steven Hill is an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New AmericaFoundation and author of Fixing Elections: The Failure ofAmerica’s Winner-Take-All Politics.

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