No “enemies” in my backyard, please!

Forget the ever-changing polls regarding Donald Trump’s strength in the coming American presidential elections—and recent polls on whether voters believe that Hillary Clinton really did have pneumonia. The poll that matters most is this: half of Republican voters, and 55 per cent of Democratic voters actually fear the other party. It’s not just that they disagree or that they are suspicious of the other side’s intentions. No, Republicans fear Democrats and Democrats fear Republicans.

In the iron-hot rhetoric of these years, it’s not difficult to see why: Fox News talking of “Obama the dictator,” or Trump rambling about deporting 11 million people—these comments hardly make for a good night’s sleep. This political paranoia, however, has deeper roots than the campaign coverage: it is based on the growing spatial separation between Americans of different political faiths, a process of socio-political self-segregation that has been going on for quite a long time and was first reported by Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing in their 2008 book The Big Sort.

Democrats want to see Democrats in the morning. Their tennis partner is more likely to be a reader of the New York Times than a watcher of Fox News. Republicans are far more likely to barbecue with fellows who despise Obama than fellows who voted for him.

We can see the pattern in the elections returns: 40 years ago, in the election of 1976 (Gerald Ford vs Jimmy Carter) only 3 per cent of US counties had a spread between the two main parties larger than 20 percentage points. In 2004, 12 years ago, the counties where one of the two parties won in a landslide were about 60 per cent. In 2012, four years ago, 2,013 counties out of 3,156—that is 64 per cent—had Obama or Romney receiveing at least 20 per cent more votes than their opponent. If we look at counties were the margin between the two candidate was larger than 10 per cent, we find that these counties were 2,591, that is five out of every six. No “enemies” in my backyard, please!

The average margin for the winning party was 15.8 points in 2004 and 17.4 points in 2008. In 2012, it jumped to 30.4 per cent. The number of swing states (defined as those where the margin was less than 5 points) went from 11 in 2004 to 6 in 2008, to 4 in 2012 (Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia). In 2012, the number of congressional districts where a majority of voters split their tickets between a presidential candidate of one party and a House candidate of the opposite party was 26 out of 435, that is 6 per cent (in 1972 they were 190, that is about 44 per cent). Most other voters supported the same party for all the offices on ballot.

This process is even more clear if we look at specific places, like the city of San Francisco, California or King County, Texas.

San Francisco in 1952 was a Republican town: 53 per cent of its vote went to Eisenhower. In 1972 there was still a solid presence of Grand Old Party: 42 per cent voted for Richard Nixon. However, in 1992 it had become overwhelmingly Democratic, with Republicans receiving only 18 per cent of the popular vote, a figure that in 2012 became a puny 13 per cent. Barack Obama got 83.53 per cent,seventy percentage points more than his opponent. On the opposite side, we can look at King county, TX, where in 2012 the Democratic President got only five votes. That is 3.4 per cent, compared to 139 ballots for Mitt Romney, 95.9 per cent, more than ninety percentage points more.

True, only 286 souls lived in King County 2010. However, its political itinerary is far from exceptional: a southern Democratic stronghold until 1968, it went for Nixon in 1972, was split evenly between Carter and Ford in 1976, and since then it has been faithful to Republican candidates, all the more so in recent times: Ronald Reagan got only 70 per cent of the popular vote in 1980, compared to the astonishing 95.9 per cent delivered to Romney in 2012. Its political history is consistent with the pattern of increased polarisation that we can observe elsewhere.

Texas has 254 counties and has consistently voted Republican since 1980. However, the 2012 score 57-41 for Romney was the result of a well-defined geographical pattern: 225 counties had Republican majorities and 29 ones had Democratic majorities. We can observe at first glance that only nine of them had a margin less than 10 percentage points, while the overwhelming majority recorded landslides of 20 points or more, very often 40 to 70 points, in favor of one party or the other.

As a matter of fact, one could start his or her exploration of the political geography of the state from Terrell County (where Cormac McCarthy situated his novel No Country for Old Men), and go north for hundreds of miles to Dallam County at the Oklahoma border, without meeting more Democrats than those necessary to fill a high-school gym. (Many of these counties are tiny, but even so the low number of Democrats is interesting.) In 2012, 184 Terrell County voters casted the ballots for Obama, and 253 Dallam citizens did the same.

But if the same observer proceeded east-south east from Terrell, following the Rio Grande down to the Gulf of Mexico, she would go through seven counties of solid Democratic tradition: Val Verde, Maverick, Webb, Zapata, Starr, Hidalgo and Cameron County all voted for Obama. Along the Mexican border, only in tiny Kinney County Mitt Romney obtained a majority. Maverick County was one of the only counties in Texas where George McGovern received a majority of the vote in 1972, and the last Republican to carry it was Herbert Hoover in 1928. We need not go further than the Census Bureau’s tables to find a good explanation: if in Dallam County only 28 per cent of citizens are Hispanic, in Maverick County the percentage is 95 per cent.

Of course, demography is not destiny but it could hardly be a coincidence that in 12 House costituencies out of 36 this year candidates are running unopposed: eight Republicans and four Democrats will go to Washington without bothering to compete with an opponent of the other party.

If we move to the Atlantic coast, we will find that in New York State Republicans don’t have a prayer (the last candidate that commanded a majority there was Ronald Reagan in 1984) but this situation is again the product of lopsided results in the cities versus the countryside. If Manhattan and Brooklyn gave Obama 83 per cent of their ballots (and the Bronx 91 per cent), the Western counties bordering Pennsylvania went for Romney, sometimes to the tune of 61 per cent, like Allegany county (which had supported McCain in 2008 with 59 per cent of the vote). Nearby Buffalo, in Erie county, has been Democratic city for decades, and it will presumably remain so.

All this is to explain that candidate Trump may lose some votes compared to more well-mannered candidates like Romney and McCain, but the geography of the vote will probably allow him to keep the bag of electoral votes cast for the Republican candidate in 2012 intact. In fact, it hardly matters if one wins with 70 per cent or 50.01 per cent: the winner-takes-all rules of the electoral college give all the delegates to the top candidate, whatever his/her score (and in a three or four-candidate race, even a plurality would do).

Political self-segregation feeds polarisation because supporters of one party, living among like-minded people, come to perceive their opponents as scary, almost alien creatures: in the Pew’s research already mentioned, pollsters found that true-believers in the two camps see the others as “closed minded,” “immoral,” “dishonest,” lazy.” One third of voters in each party think the other party’s supporters are simply stupid (“unintelligent" in the sanitised language of the firm).

Will Trump lose traditionally Republican voters in the November election? Polls suggest as much, but it is a well-known fact that outsiders’ final performances are often underestimated by the polls. True, half of the Republican electorate appears to hold a negative opinion of him but chances are that most of these unhappy voters will eventually go back to the fold. He would perform well in overwhelmingly white states like Iowa and New Hampshire (where 93 percent of the voters were white in 2012), Wisconsin (86 percent), Ohio (79 percent), and Pennsylvania (78 percent). Swing states like Virginia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have recently voted Democratic at the presidential level but have strong rural areas which lean Republican and a vast reservoir of non-voters among whom Trump’s message may resonate. How much he stands to gain from Hillary Clinton’s recent bout of illness remains to be seen.

We should remember that strong nativist impulses are certainly not new in American history: actually they go back all the way to the founding of the Republic: the “Alien and Sedition Act” was passed in 1798, the growth of the “Know-Nothing” party contributed to the birth of the Republican party in the mid-19th century, and fear of an invasion of “inferior races” dominated the late 19th and early 20th century. More recently, since 2001, a majority, or at least a plurality, of Americans has consistently expressed its dissatisfaction for the number of immigrants. Trump is clearly talking to this part of the country when he makes his far-fetched promises of building a wall and “making Mexicans pay for it.” In 2012, two well-respected political analysts wrote: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” An organisation, in other words, ready to choose someone like Donald Trump as its standard bearer. How well this new GOP will perform on 8th November, only time will tell.