THE SPOOKIEST THING IN AMERICA: POLARIZED BIPARTISANSHIP

The ballots are out, pumpkins are carved, and proselytizing, fear-mongering ads play on every commercial break. Don’t watch TV? Well, lucky you, they play on YouTube as well. Such is the scene in October (and early November) on even-numbered years.

You don’t have to go to a haunted house for a good scare; just wait for a borderline slanderous ad to come on and take a look at the state of American politics.

Many people might even be truly horrified at the state of the union.

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Pew Research Center has reported that a majority of people describe themselves as politically independent, while expressing a lean to one major political party or the other. It also found that among self-identified Republicans and Democrats almost half say that they feel anger, frustration, and even fear due to the opposing party – to the point that almost half continue on to say that the opposing parties policies are highly misguided and even harmful to the nation.

Even so, research out of Stanford University suggests that extremist nominees decrease a party’s own voter turnout in elections, which steers the general electorate towards the opposition candidate instead. It would seem that moderate candidates can be more beneficial to a party, as party extremists seem to activate the opposing party’s base more than motivating its own side.

More so, even though control of the White House has alternated by party over the last few decades, public trust in the government has been on a steady decline.

So, if Americans don’t like extreme candidates from either side, even going so far as to say they fear opposing candidates, why aren’t our politics gravitating towards moderation?

Well, that may be in part due to the two-party system, which is continuously reinforced by the Commission on Presidential Debates: An unelected group of people that decides which candidates get to reach the American public through participation in the presidential debates, and which candidates should fall through the cracks.

A political scholar by the name of Larry Diamond goes so far as to insist that without access to these debates – which are such a huge national focus when voters are forming opinions leading up to an election – no candidate, regardless of party affiliation, could attain presidency.

This narrow access may allow partisan candidates to run further and further away from each other, ideologically, because their only competition is on the opposite side of the spectrum. The idea behind that is: Republican partisans want a red candidate and Democratic partisans want a blue one, so to keep adherents voting within their party nominees should be the deepest hues of red and blue, respectively, and should not deviate from party ideology.

However, as was previously noted, that is the opposite of what most Americans want. So, why do we keep sending extremists to the general elections?

It could be in part due to our voting system. More than half of the states in our country do not allow party affiliated citizens to vote across party lines in primary elections (with some caveats), and nine states do not even allow unaffiliated voters to have a say in primaries. This encourages strong partisanship and allows strongly partisan citizens to choose who advances to the general elections.

Seeing as declared independents are the majority of voters, and often the deciding votes in elections, it could be very balancing to allow them to vote in primaries and across party lines – the “open primary” system. More moderate candidates may surface under those circumstances.

In fact, according to the nonprofit public policy group, the Brookings Institution, no Democratic candidate has put his caboose in the president’s seat without winning at least 60 percent of independents’ votes since 1976. This means that things may be looking grim for Democrats hoping to gain footing as they continuously move to the left, rather than the center, of the political spectrum.

This could also be a source of public dissatisfaction, as moderates feel they must evaluate and choose the lesser of the two partisan evils presented to them during general elections. Then they’re stuck with a choice they may not have truly endorsed for the next four years, specifically with regard to the presidency.

These factors haven’t only affected the presidential race. Polarized partisanship has infected Congress as well, which has led to political instability and congressional paralysis and incoherency as a legislative body. At times it can be nearly impossible to move any sort of legislation through a split, polarized body of people, for better or for worse, as – Oh, the horror! – such teamwork might entice Representatives and Senators to produce more moderate legislation.

Is moderation the be all, end all of American politics? Probably not, but neither is extreme polarization or ideological intolerance, which we see far too much of nowadays.

Our weekly editorial is designed to explore compelling issues that affect the community we serve.  It has no attributed author because it represents the collective voice of the Advocate editorial board.

Advocate Staff