Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine takes a look at the decline of swing voting as the parties have become polarized: "Politics in a Country Where Nobody Changes Their Mind." Excerpt:
The sorting of American politics into semipermanent, warring camps unfolded over decades. But the red-blue map that first came into public consciousness during the 2000 election created a searing impression of a cultural divide between a Democratic Party rooted in the coasts and upper Midwest and a Republican Party dominating the old Confederacy, Appalachia, and the Mountain West. Smidt points out that the jarring events of George W. Bush’s first term — a recession, a terrorist attack, a war in Iraq — failed to dislodge the hardening partisan loyalties. “After having gone through a recession and a war,” he writes, “pure independents were more stable in their party support across 2000–04 than strong partisans were across 1972–76 and about as stable as strong partisans across 1956–60.” The partisan voter of a generation ago switched parties more frequently than today’s independent voter.He closes with:
Eventually something will happen to break up the current arrangement. Maybe Republicans will one day move to the center, or left-wing activists will push Democrats out of it. (Right now the latter seems more likely than the former.) For the time being, the dominant fact of American politics is that nobody is changing their mind about anything.Me: I think the situation is less stable than all that. Consider the polling results reported here:
"Many Conservative Republicans Believe Climate Change Is a Real Threat." Excerpts:
A majority of Republicans — including 54 percent of self-described conservative Republicans — believe the world’s climate is changing and that mankind plays some role in the change, according to a new survey conducted by three prominent Republican pollsters.
...
On the campaign trail, the leading Republican presidential contenders question or deny human-caused climate change. In an interview on CNN last week, Donald J. Trump said, “I don’t believe in climate change.” In an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle this month, Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who, along with Mr. Trump, is at the top of many recent polls said, “There is no overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused.”
While such statements sit well with many conservative activists, the new survey found that 73 percent of all voters and 56 percent of Republicans do believe the climate is changing. Fewer than a third of Republicans think the climate is changing because of purely natural cycles, and only 9 percent think the climate is not changing at all, the survey found. It also found that 72 percent of Republicans support accelerating the development of renewable energy sources.Me: Climate is an issue where I am particularly at odds with most of the politicians and pundits of what has been my party. Like George Shultz, I favor a carbon fee and dividend system such as proposed by the Citizens Climate Lobby (and I watched Shultz being dismissed, ludicrously, for left-wing thinking by Rubio and Christie at a recent debate). But that's the not the only issue where I've veered -- or in some cases stayed more or less where I was and watched the GOP veer away from me. In either case, somebody has changed their mind, and maybe that can happen again.
I suspect Mitt Romney lost partly because Hurricane Sandy provided such a vivid reminder shortly before the election of what will become increasingly likely as climate is disrupted. Reality has a way of intruding on people who have walled themselves off from it, and some of those people might become swing voters, since neither party is immune to insularity's temptation 100% of the time.
UPDATE: Marco Rubio apparently bases his opposition to carbon taxes on an assumption of U.S. weakness.
