Don’t blame Donald Trump for creating the great divide in the nation. The gulf, multiple gulfs actually, were growing before his MAGA rhetoric ushered him into the White House.
You can blame him for widening the gaps, however. You can blame him for making the divisions more distinct.
Those are conclusions drawn by Dan Balz, the author of four books and a political reporter and editor for the Washington Post for four decades. Now the Post’s chief correspondent, he was in Bloomington last week as part of the IU Media School Speaker Series and to receive the Lee H. Hamilton Fellowship in Public Service.
His presentation was called “America in Red and Blue: The Roots of Political Polarization.” In it, he dissected the various political divisions in this country, which are considerably more than Republicans versus Democrats.
“Political polarization has been a growing fact in politics for a long time,” he said, with two “broken political parties” and huge mistrust on both sides.
President Trump inherited a divided nation, he said, basing his belief on deep dives into data collected over time. But Trump has added to the problems by going to war with institutions and challenging the legitimacy of fact-based reporting.
All in all, he’s the most polarizing president in recent U.S. history. According to Gallup Polls, he has 87 percent approval from people who identify with his party, and just 7 percent approval from those in the other party, a gap of 80 points. That’s 10 points more than Barack Obama, 19 more points than George W. Bush, 25 more points than Bill Clinton and 28 more points than Ronald Reagan.
The divide continues to widen in terms of party politics. Ideology is increasingly a deciding factor, with socalled liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats declining. The political middle, what former astronaut and Sen. John Glenn called “the sensible center,” has almost disappeared, Balz said.
“We have been moving steadily in this direction for some time,” he said. “The reason is the way we have been sorting ourselves out.”
Demographic sorting
Republicans are more and more a party of white voters; Democrats are more likely to be diverse. According to data shared by Balz, in 2016, 87 of every 100 votes Trump received came from white voters, compared to 55 of every 100 votes Clinton received. In 1960, Richard Nixon received 30 percent of the African-American vote; in 2016, Trump got just 8 percent.
Geographic sorting
In addition, in the most rural and small-town counties, Trump won 3.6 million more votes than GOP candidate Mitt Romney won in 2012, but in the most urban and suburban counties, he won 1.6 million fewer votes than Romney had won.
Partisan sorting
“I suspect most of you are more passionate about your politics than you were 10 years ago,” Balz said. That passion is becoming personal, which “ought to worry all of us,” he added, because of the growing degree to which people have hostile feelings about the other side. Just eight years ago, in 2008, 32 percent of Republicans said they had a highly negative view of Democrats. That number has grown to 58 percent. The parallel “highly negative” view Democrats have of Republicans has grown from 37 percent to 55 percent.
Educational sorting
This kind of sorting is particularly relevant to Bloomington and other college communities. Only two states with smaller than the U.S. average of advanced degrees voted for Clinton (Indiana was not one of them), while all the rest voted for Trump. All states with higher than the U.S. average of advanced degrees voted for Clinton. Balz called the educational divide the “most critical and important new division in politics.”
Particularly relevant to journalists is the perception of the media and the sorting process there. People are reading and watching more of what reinforces what they already think, rather than views that might challenge what they think or believe.
Trump’s attacks on the media is having what Balz called “a corrosive effect on how people think about the role of the press.” He said reporting should be what it has always been, to try to find the proof and to hold people in power accountable.
“Just because you don’t like a story doesn’t mean it’s fake news,” he said.
“Those of us in the media know the stakes are very high for kind of work that we do.”
The Balz presentation was clear: The nation is divided, in many more ways than one.