Gerrymandering Schmerrymandering

In spite of my promise of a weekly summary of Paul Begala's class, I am not going to talk about that one this week.  Don't get me wrong, it was a fabulous class.  We learned about the inner working of press conferences and that Clinton had to be dissuaded from doing a photo op with the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders ("Sometimes he didn't think the optics through").  But this week, I was really struck with my reading for my class with Alice Rivlin (yes, I do have the best professors).


The class is called "Policymaking in a Polarized Environment", and so far, we've been just getting introduced to the class and doing reading about the history of political polarization and current research on its causes, etc.  One thing is for sure: our Congress is about as polarized as it has ever been, and that shift has been almost entirely on the right.  As in, Republican members of Congress have moved decisively to the right, while Democratic members of Congress have become more cohesive, but have remained ideologically consistent.  But both sides are less likely to vote across party lines or agree to compromising decisions.


The question is why.  A popular theory  has been gerrymandering; the idea being that as districts have been carved up to support one party or the other, candidates have less incentive to appeal to swing voters and moderates.  Before doing my reading, this is what I thought.


Now I just wish it were true.


Turns out, (1) people are just moving into more ideologically confined districts; cartographers don't have to do a whole lot of work to group us by party.  (2) It's people's preferences that are getting more polarized, not the districts.  People who are politically active and engaged are more likely to hold extreme views and express them more loudly, and moderate voters are more likely to align their voting patterns with these more active members of their community, rather than "waste" votes.


I find this incredibly depressing.  I would love to blame our deep divides on state governments and commissions, etc.  But no.  We just don't want to be around each other.  It makes me increasingly grateful that I grew up in a Republican household, where I learned how to respect views I disagree with, and then went to school in Texas, where I learned how to live around people who were culturally radically different from me.  Maybe it should be a requirement that everyone from the South has to move to hippie dippy Ojai for a year, and vice versa.


Says the girl who now lives in a 75% Democrat city that voted 92% for Obama.  Oh well.