Could America be any more polarized? Yes, we could be fighting a civil war.

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Michael Ramm

One month to the day after Democrats won sweeping gains in the midterm elections, three prominent political observers pondered the causes and intensity of America’s political polarization in a half-filled Cubberley Auditorium last night.

“We’re not on the battlefields yet,” said Gary Jacobson, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego.

One month to the day after Democrats won sweeping gains in the midterm elections, three prominent political observers pondered the causes and intensity of America’s political polarization in a half-filled Cubberley Auditorium last night.

Jacobson argued that President Bush has been the most divisive president in the 70 years that public opinion polls have been conducted.

“If not polarized,” he said, “we are certainly sharply divided by party on the current leadership of our country.”

Prior to Bush, Jacobson said, the lowest approval rating any president ever received from voters in the opposition party was 11 percent for Richard Nixon just before he resigned. But the current president has had ratings as low as 4 percent among Democrats.

Bill Clinton won election in 1992 and 1996 by “triangulating,” a strategy that relied on centrist and independent voters to win a plurality of votes. Karl Rove, the president’s chief political tactician, built George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns by firing up the party’s base of evangelical and conservative voters. The Democratic romp in last month’s elections, the panelists said, at least somewhat invalidated this strategy.

“The problem with Rove’s brand of politics is that it leaves no margin for error,” said John Harris, formerly the national politics editor of the Washington Post, who argued that this strategy is not a “promising model for long-term success.”

Harris said Rove believes the electorate is deeply divided while Clinton thinks it is not and that Republicans have played up unresolved disagreements to win votes.

But Hoover Senior Fellow and Political Science Prof. Morris Fiorina said there is little evidence that Americans are getting more polarized. He cited Gallup polls which show more self-described moderates now than in the 1970s.

“Certainly, Americans have political differences, but the differences between ordinary citizens are far smaller than between the elites,” he said. “It’s not so much people’s underlying positions. It’s their attitude toward what’s being done.”

Through a process of self-selection, he said, people have ended up in the party that most closely matches their ideology. At the same time, talk radio and blogs have helped to push candidates to move to extremes.

“I think Karl Rove got Bush reelected in 2004 in spite of himself,” he said. “In a time of peace and prosperity, Bush won narrowly in 2000. I think that should have been a lesson that there was a lot of appeal in his compassionate conservatism. Instead, I think they took the wrong lesson from it.”

Harris described a political world where “people are on separate sides and even separate factual universes.”

“Increasingly, there’s a dysfunctional element to politics,” he said. “You can’t have an authentic debate when there are not agreed-upon facts.”

Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review, was supposed to be on the panel. Lowry, however, recently suffered a concussion, not from a political fight in Washington, but by playing ice hockey without a helmet.