The Big Sort

No, We Didn’t: America Hasn't Changed as Much as Tuesday’s Results Would Indicate

2008-11-10T18:22:00Z

One week after a historic presidential campaign that ended with the election of a man who billed himself as a post-partisan candidate of a unified America, this country is more divided than it was four or eight years ago. Or, less abstractly, while some danced in the streets over Barack Obama's victory, others bought guns . Here are some preliminary results from Tuesday's election: • Communities are just as partisan now as they were in 2004. Most counties in the United States have grown either more...(read more)

It's Time Now To Allow Politicians To Do Their Jobs

2008-11-04T14:20:00Z

Anthropologist E.E. Evans-Prichard studied the Nuer, a pastoral people living in the Upper Nile region of Africa, herders who moved with their animals to the tune of the region's rivers. In flood times, Nuer tribes retreated to higher ground, and when the waters receded, the Nuer clans moved to the grassy valleys. Nuer tribes were constantly crossing paths, and so they could easily fall into conflict over lost animals and scarce forage. Professor Evans-Prichard wrote in the 1940s about the intricate...(read more)

Still Undecided? Ask Your Neighbor.

2008-11-03T14:14:00Z

Undecideds don't vote on issues. If they were interested in issues—or even in the personalities of candidates—they wouldn't be undecideds. "They are not radical, not liberal, not conservative, not reactionary," C. Wright Mills wrote in 1953, "they are inactionary; they are out of it." Mills was writing about the torpor of Eisenhower-era Americans, but this is also a good description of undecideds a day before the 2008 election. How do you get "inactionaries" to vote? Mostly, undecideds split evenly...(read more)

How Running a Campaign Is Like Building a Megachurch

2008-10-30T13:47:00Z

The model for the modern political campaign is the evangelical megachurch. This isn't a partisan observation. Both George Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama adopted the basic organizing techniques that many ministers have been using since the 1970s to grow their churches to stupendous size. And why not? They work. The megachurch was built on an idea born in India by an American missionary. Donald McGavran spent half a century overseas, and he used much of that time to discover the way churches could convert...(read more)

America's Partisan Reading List

2008-10-29T14:18:00Z

Before last week, every time Valdis Krebs mapped the reading habits of those buying political books through Amazon.com, he found a few volumes read by both the left and the right . Krebs used data from Amazon to discover the patterns among readers of the top-selling political books. He would find the other books that readers of, say, Liberal Fascism , would buy from Amazon. As he accumulated data, Krebs found that most books were connected to others. People who bought Liberal Fascism also bought...(read more)

The Stuff in Your Bedroom Signals How You Vote

2008-10-28T14:46:00Z

When Sam Gosling studied the differences between liberal and conservative college students, he and his colleagues went snooping for cleaning supplies. In the dorm rooms of conservatives, they found more cans of Ajax and ironing boards. In an unpublished paper titled "The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives," Gosling, a psychology professor at the University of Texas, and three other colleagues* looked for the underlying personality traits that defined left and right. Gosling is the author...(read more)

Which Side Is Trying To Steal the Election? The Other One.

2008-10-27T12:39:00Z

My wife coined the term prespiracy to describe a conspiracy that had not yet occurred. It's a future conspiracy imagined into reality. Well, the prespiracies have started. Republicans are convinced ACORN has hijacked the election by registering legions of Democratic voters (all named Mickey Mouse). Not wanting to be out-prespiracied, People for the American Way bought a full page in the New York Times with a 125-point, single-word headline: "Fraud." The liberal-leaning group warned that Republicans...(read more)

An Election Story for Those Who Like To Watch

2008-10-22T00:05:00Z

Enough already with the words. Think of this as The Big Sort scorecard for the election, several different ways of seeing how the geographic clustering of like-minded citizens plays out in presidential elections. First, the sort itself . Here we compare the "landslide counties" in the 1976 and 2004 elections. (Landslide counties are those in which one candidate won by 20 percentage points or more, counting only Republican and Democratic votes.) Both '76 and '04 were close contests, but the distribution...(read more)

Spank Your Kids? You Likely Vote Republican.

2008-10-21T13:11:00Z

While the rest of political journalism continues to parse the electorate by ways of life described by the U.S. census— Matt Bai gets up close and chummy with "white guys" in the Times over the weekend—we at The Big Sort will consider two measures that are much more telling: Spanking and shacking. Yes, if you really want to know how people will vote, forget "white working class" or "single, college-educated women" and find out the important stuff—like whether a potential voter thinks it's OK to give...(read more)

Why the Workplace Is Essential to Democracy

2008-10-20T13:19:00Z

"Jennifer" called into the NPR show "Talk of the Nation" last Thursday to describe a wonderful democratic experiment she and her husband were conducting at the business they own in North Carolina. Their firm has about 100 workers, and she and her husband believe that "it's important for all of our employees to really be engaged and aware citizens." So Jennifer holds what she calls "lunch ‘n' learns" throughout the year. Sometimes employees will lead discussions on issues over the noon hour. (Workers...(read more)

This Campaign Has Gone Positively 19th Century

2008-10-17T13:08:00Z

This election is getting out of hand. For one rally, I read, the locals rigged up six horses to a wagon big enough to carry a pipe organ and a glee club with 40 singers. Was this a prop for another Barack Obama mega-rally? Or maybe a Sarah Palin revival? Nope. The six white horses were put to the service of Republican William McKinley in 1896. A two-score political singing group was nothing special back then. Campaigns were exercises in organizing large groups of marching partisans. In Sullivan County,...(read more)

Answers of a Political Sort

2008-10-16T17:45:00Z

Bill has just finished a vigorous online chat with readers, and here's the transcript of the discussion. See what readers have to say about the diversity of political leanings in Alaska or the attitudes of people in the suburbs toward urban life. They also touch on the demise of the polite political argument. Good stuff....(read more)

Questions of a Political Sort

2008-10-15T18:44:00Z

"Big Sort" blogger Bill Bishop will chat online with readers about political segregation and voter trends on Thursday, Oct. 16. Follow the chat starting at noon at Washingtonpost.com or pose an advance question now ....(read more)

Where Are All The Good Men?

2008-10-15T14:50:00Z

Political polling parses data according to broad demographic categories—by sex, age, education, race, religion. The polls have been run this way for years, which makes it easy to compare results from election to election. It doesn't matter that these demographic descriptions are only a faint approximation of how people define their lives and politics. This is the tool political reporters have, and so they use it. (What's the line about having a hammer makes everything look like nails?) Marketing...(read more)

Enough Already With Political Categories Like "White Women"

2008-10-14T13:05:00Z

Let's get something straight. There is no "women's vote." Women vote, of course. But reporters write about the "voting bloc" of white women as if it has meaning. It doesn't. Elections aren't about demography. They are about ways of life. Marketing people have known that large demographic categories like "white women" are meaningless since at least 1973, when a New York adman asked in the Journal of Advertising , "Are Grace Slick and Tricia Nixon Cox the same person?" Both were white, young, urban,...(read more)

Extremism at McCain Rallies Comes Naturally

2008-10-13T12:50:00Z

French students who disliked America (and loved Charles de Gaulle) were once asked to talk about the United States for an hour or two. At the end of the session, conducted as part of experiments in the 1960s, the students disliked America — and loved de Gaulle — even more. College kids who join a conservative fraternity move to the right during their four years in college. Liberals from Boulder asked to discuss some issues of the day, such as global warming and gay marriage, are more liberal at the...(read more)

Learning a Lesson From the "Redneck Caucus"

2008-10-09T13:00:00Z

Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker went to "central casting" in the spring of '06 to find the candidate who could win in Bush-red communities. Goldberg recounted a stilted encounter between the Kerrys (John and Teresa Heinz) and a Missouri hog farmer, concluding that Democrats needed candidates who "speak in language familiar to, among others, the disaffected hog farmers of Missouri." Like Claire McCaskill, a U.S. Senate candidate in Missouri who fit easily in rural communities. McCaskill won in...(read more)

Realignment? Nope. Just More of The Same.

2008-10-08T13:09:00Z

A few days after the 2006 election, the Washington Post announced , " 'God gap' in American politics has narrowed substantially." By 2006, so went the theory, evangelicals were disgruntled with George W. Bush. All the fundamentalists, charismatics, megachurchers, and Southern Baptists were shifting away from the Republicans. The evangelical church was undergoing some kind of fundamental change, and their votes were there for the Democratic taking. Oh yeah? Seventy percent of white evangelicals voted...(read more)

If This Is a "Change" Election, Then What's Changed?

2008-10-07T11:56:00Z

Let's consider what's not new in this election. There's a lot. The last five or six elections have been pushed along by trends that have been in place since the mid-1970s. Despite the extraordinary circumstances this year, the basic political contours of the country haven't changed (or haven't changed yet!). If anything, 2008 appears to be more an extension of the 2006 midterms, an election that changed little in the country's basic political makeup from 2004—except, of course, for the name of the...(read more)

What Change Means: It's Not Policy; It's Process

2008-10-06T12:24:00Z

"Palin and Biden Stake Their Claims on Change," rang the lead headline in the Times after the vice-presidential debate. Who could blame them? With several wars, Great Depression II, a blistering civil conflict in Pakistan, and European economic collapse, change would be welcome. But there's something else going on with this "change" business, the reason why "change" is such an appealing message to Americans. It's not that an overwhelming number of voters want a change in particular policy. What Americans...(read more)