Well, the Fox viewing audience is less than 2 percent of the eligible electorate while the audiences of MSNBC news shows are even smaller. Liberals worry about Fox News and conservatives about MSNBC. Less than 3 percent of the eligible electorate subscribes to the New York Times. About 235 million Americans are eligible to vote in the general election. Members of the broader American public are simply not that involved in politics. They are the public face of politics, but they are not representative of average Americans. What I call the political class – office-holders and candidates, donors, party and issue activists, partisan media commentators – are far more polarized than they used to be. A bigger problem is who the media covers. Conflict has high news value, so the media always have a bias toward covering conflict rather than cooperation, partisan warfare rather than bipartisan compromise. Oh no, although the media certainly contribute. So, are you saying that the media are to blame? Of course, you’d never know that if your picture of America comes from cable television and social media. Majorities of Republicans and Democrats agreed on 150 specific policy proposals all across the issue spectrum. In August, for example, Voice of the People, a nonpartisan organization, released the results of in-depth surveys covering more than 80,000 Americans. Since Trump’s election, it’s been a hard argument to sell but the evidence hasn’t changed. I’ve actually been making that argument – with lots of data – since the early 2000s when the red-state, blue-state narrative first emerged in political commentary. was exaggerated – that the ideologies and policy preferences of Americans had not changed much in several decades. When you last spoke to Stanford News Service in 2017, you claimed that political polarization in the U.S. Fiorina is also the Wendt Family Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. His book Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting and Political Stalemate examines the American electorate and its voting patterns. Because the parties only have support by a minority, they tend to lose the support of marginal supporters when party leaders push for full control to advance their platforms, Fiorina explains.įiorina, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, studies elections and public opinion. As a result, control of the presidency, the Senate and the House “flip-flops,” he says. He argues that while the leadership and activists among the nation’s two main political parties are deeply polarized, the broader American public is not. Here, Fiorina talks about polarization in America today. This “party sorting” has led to the gridlock that characterizes much of contemporary politics, said Fiorina in an interview with Stanford News Service. As Democrats become more consistently liberal and Republicans more consistently conservative, the possibility of bipartisan compromise has greatly diminished, says Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina.
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