It’s Election Day today. As I’ve mentioned before, for sixty years I didn’t give a shit about politics. I was a ware of the political landscape and I had my views, but I simply had no time for it all, as life was keeping me busy enough and politics seemed like a game and one big distraction. I got called out for this apathetic view as a freshman in college when the bearded radical on the floor, a guy named Frank, gave me shit about the fact that during the early preparation for the 1972 election, while he was hitchhiking to New Hampshire to stump for George McGovern, I was playing pinball at the student union. Of course, McGovern’s 17 electoral votes in ‘72 represented the worst drubbing any candidate had gotten since Alf Landon got 8 electoral votes in 1936. Even Barry Goldwater got 52 electoral votes in 1964 when the world was not ready for a reactionary Arizonan after the Camelot years of Kennedy. Maybe it was because in the years I was a young voting-age adult, things were not so polarized.
By most measures, the country is far more polarized now versus the past 60 years, and that shows up in about how much people dislike the other party more than about how far apart their views are. Political scientists who score every member of Congress by roll-call votes find the congressional parties pulled apart starting in the mid-1970s. Congress is now more polarized than at any time since the end of Reconstruction, something I am reminded of every other day by my political history guru, Heather Cox Richardson, who is a specialist on the Reconstruction era. In 1973–74, 240 House members fell between the most conservative Democrat and the most liberal Republican. By 2011–12 there was no overlap at all in either chamber. The main driver of this has been regional sorting. Liberal Northeastern Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats largely disappeared. The South’s House delegation went from 91 Democrats and 42 Republicans in 1973–74 to 107 Republicans and 47 Democrats in 2011–12. Pew’s analysis finds both parties moved away from the center, with Republicans moving considerably further. But maybe that’s just Congress, which we would all agree is a pretty dysfunctional body these days.
Among voters, the gap is mostly in how people feel. Ratings of the other party on a 0–100 “feeling thermometer” fell from about 48 in the 1970s to about 20 today. A widely cited study compared attitudes in 1960 and 2010 about a child marrying someone from the other party. In 1960, only about 5% of partisans said they’d mind. By 2010, roughly a third of Democrats and half of Republicans said they would. I would argue that while we are past the child marrying issues, that thinking surely dominates the Thanksgiving table or even the dinner-out table. I don’t want to sit through a meal with people with strident opposing views. It truly takes an effort to avoid politics these days at the dinner table and who needs the indigestion of strong political views to make the evening unpleasant. And yet, despite this tribalism, policy views themselves have diverged much less (though I wonder if that’s still so in late 2026…data is yet to be gathered on that). Survey data since 1972 show only a modest ideological spread in the public. The caveat is that the 1960 baseline for political views was unusually low. Each party then contained both liberals and conservatives, partly because of the segregationist Southern Democrats, so low polarization didn’t necessarily mean more agreement. Some researchers argue the intense hostility is concentrated in the roughly one-third of Americans who are strong partisans. Many others simply dislike politics altogether. That feels right to me and we see it in our daily lives, with some friends simply demanding that politics not be in the mix. Cross-country data show the U.S. had the largest rise in affective polarization among nine developed democracies. In five of them, including Britain, Germany, and Australia, it fell. So as with many leadership issues, America is leading the way, even though there should be no pride in this one.
In 2016, Kim and I were living on Staten Island, something we still shake our heads in disbelief about. We lived on the north shore of the Island, facing lower Manhattan. Staten Island was and remains the only borough of New York City that votes Republican, but the north shore, which was heavily minority and ethnic, was decidedly Democratic. Given the mega project I was working on, I had to deal with the Borough President almost daily and he was a staunch Republican, and the local City Councilwoman, who was very liberal. I also had to deal with City Hall, and the larger City Council, and they were all decidedly Democratic. I had gotten approval for the project from Michael Bloomberg when he way Mayor and he was more like me, somewhere in the middle. He had been a Republican and had become a Democrat and was more or less fiscally conservative but socially liberal. While not everything Bloomberg did was perfect, I generally feel that he did a good job with NYC and that his leadership should have made him a strong President if only the rest of the country was not so suspicious of New Yorkers (and especially a New York billionaire Jew) at that time. How strange that they couldn’t get comfortable with such a competent man with those credentials and yet they got behind a New York billionaire buffoon like Trump. But back to election night 2016…it was the one and only time this politically apathetic man (that would be me) threw an election night party for all my local friends. While the Republican Borough President did show up with a few other Republicans, mostly the attendees were Democratically inclined. As the evening wore on and the reality of Hillary Clinton’s shocking defeat to Donald Trump became clear, the party fizzled like a deflating convention balloon. It was a strange feeling for me because I knew Trump too well and I couldn’t believe this was really happening. It was also strange because it was like the universe was telling me that political apathy was more rewarding than getting politically motivated only to have things go the wrong way.
So here we are, ten years on from that date. I have gone from someone who watched or listened to 8 hours minimum of MSNBC per day and was totally riled up in 2020 and 2024, to someone who has spent two years now with my head in the sand literally not watching ANY news unless I’m traveling and turn on CNN in my hotel room. I stay abreast of the news, but simply cannot take the firehose of cable news any more. I have peaked at a few articles about the Midterms, but I even try to avoid all the analysis because I have found I just want to know where it comes out, not how it might come out. I am intensely interested in the outcome of today’s election and my anticipation level this morning is palpable. No party here tonight as we hunker down for the results. I am expecting a big blue wave and will be disappointed if we don’t get that…but I’ve gotten too used to political disappointment in the last decade to feel that it simply can’t happen again. I know it can, as much as I fervently pray that it won’t. I was pleased by the turnover in Hungary and the ousting of Orban. I was surprised and relieved (almost exultant) about Lula disposing of Flavio Bolsonaro. I was disappointed by the AfD wins in Germany, but encouraged by Andy Burnham’s rise in the UK. That’s all nice to have, but my real palpable anticipation is about finally being done with Trump and his band of misfits. Fingers crossed.
P.S. The Blue Wave has hit big and I will sleep like a baby tonight…after watching 8 hrs straight of MS NOW.