![]() ![]() I think we saw that in both parties this year, and I think that’s a hopeful sign given the stalemate that's characterized our politics for the past decade or so. What we're seeing, I think, are increasing indications that the voters really want someone outside the two-party system that exists today. It just means that she agrees with them more than with the Republicans. If a voter consistently votes Democratic, it doesn't mean that she agrees with the party on every issue. But they stay Catholic rather than convert to another religion. Could you safely infer that most Catholics agree with the bishops? From surveys, we know that a majority of Catholics disagree with the church's position on contraception and a substantial proportion disagrees on abortion. We know that most of the Catholic bishops take a hard line on contraception and abortion. Let’s say you're talking about Catholics. What they mostly would like is for some party to come in and govern the country with some degree of success. ![]() They're not going to move to Canada if their side loses, let alone want to kill people who disagree with them. Moreover, they aren’t that involved in politics. Most people are a mix of conservative and liberal positions with some sympathy for both sides of political debates. 2016 ABRAMOWITZ TIME FOR CHANGE POLARIZATION FULLThe country is not full of partisan warriors. My point is that this elite-level polarization hasn’t infected most of the American electorate. They are more at odds today than they’ve been since the ’60s. It's clear that political elites - candidates, activists, donors - are very divided. We definitely have two very ideologically divided parties right now - more than we had for most of the 20th century. Fiorina: This election proves voters aren’t hungering for partisan warriors Scott Olson / Getty Jeff SteinĬan you lay out what you think is happening in American politics right now? Why shouldn’t we fear that the two increasingly divided parties are just going to be more at odds and less able to find compromise? Most of the political scientists I’ve talked to seem to think that’s where we’re going. In fact, he said it had only made him more optimistic.Ī transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. In an interview earlier this month, I asked Fiorina if this campaign had rattled his hopeful vision of American politics. If the voters really aren’t polarized, why do they keep gravitating toward politicians further and further from the political center? To be frank: This idea seems tough to reconcile with the 2016 election. In this telling, it’s Washington elites who are getting more and more polarized, and the country is just being taken along for the ride. Instead, Fiorina thinks that politics in Washington is broken by partisan warriors at the elite level alone - but that the voters themselves have been crying out for less ideological extremism. ![]() He doesn’t deny that the two parties’ elected leaders in Congress have continued to drift further and further apart on the issues and in their ability to strike compromises.īut he doesn’t think the voters are to blame. Mo Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford, sees it differently. To a lot of political scientists, the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders this year looks like powerful confirmation of “political polarization” - the idea that the American electorate is increasingly cleaving into a growing red camp and a growing blue camp. ![]() Republican primary voters chose a presidential candidate who wants to deport 11 million Mexican immigrants, thinks climate change is a hoax, and has called for the biggest tax cuts in modern history.ĭemocratic primary voters came very close to nominating a presidential candidate who calls himself a “democratic socialist,” wants to expand federal spending by $33 trillion, and proposed the biggest tax increases in modern history. ![]()
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