The Parties Might Not Be What You Imagine

September 2018

A new study of the American electorate offers a counterintuitive and even somewhat optimistic assessment of our immediate political future.

Basing his research on surveys of 2,000 Americans interviewed in 2015 and 2016, Larry M. Bartels, a Vanderbilt University political scientist, casts doubt on conventional views of both Democrats and Republicans and the divisions within their respective parties. The idea that the Democrats are deeply divided by the “young progressives” who support Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism and the older “neoliberals” represented by the Clintons and Joe Biden is an oversimplification. There are some divisions, but they are not, as that schema suggests, over economic issues and the role of government.

In fact, rank-and-file Democrats are “relatively united” in their enthusiasm for an activist federal government but in considerable disagreement over “cultural issues, where a sizable minority cling to the traditional values downplayed or even rejected by most party leaders.”

Divisions among Republicans are similarly exaggerated, a view that challenges the claim that “profound ideological differences” within the GOP, as The Washington Post puts it, “have become much more pronounced in the Trump era.” In fact, the migration of “working-class whites” to Republican ranks, according to John Sides of George Washington University, occurred mainly from 2008 to 2011 and was not therefore “a consequence of the 2016 campaign.” Trump was a beneficiary of this shift, not a cause of it. He isn’t “remaking the party in his own image.” In one sense, the party as we know it remade the former Democrat to resemble it.

Tensions Will Ease?

The hopeful note — Bartels’ prediction that “the political salience of cultural tensions will fade somewhat” — recalls the great economist Lord John Maynard Keynes’ observation that “in the long run, we are all dead.” Bartels sees a “convergence in views between Republicans and the electorate as a whole, since the average difference in cultural views between young Republicans and their elders is significantly greater than for Independents or Democrats.” So, as long as the future electorate “comes to look like the young voters of today,” some of the anxieties over hot-button social issues will abate. That will happen, that is, as the older Republicans fade away.