The Big Sort

by Bill Bishop

  The Politics of Place

  Initially, Cushing and I were so interested in the economic effects of the Big Sort that we paid no attention to whether the phenomenon meant anything to politics. That was an oversight. After all, the movements we were tracking were enormous. More people were moving from one county to another in a single year than new population was added nationally in four years. It was clear the Big Sort wasn't random. The sorting we saw in the last decades of the twentieth century created prosperity in some places and decimated economies in others. It just made sense that this internal migration had changed the nation's politics, too. Then I received one of those magnificent midnight e-mails from Cushing.

  He had access to presidential voting results for each U.S. county since 1948, collected by the web-based election data impresario David Leip. The presidential election is the only national office common to all voters. We decided to use presidential election results—instead of either voter registration or state elections—as the common measurement among the nation's more than 3,100 counties to avoid the effects of different candidates or changing voting districts. To even out the comparisons over time, we excluded third-party candidates.4 Demographers have several ways to measure segregation, and Cushing tested them all. The formulas tell, for example, whether the proportion of blacks and whites living in Brooklyn is similar to the proportion of the races in New York City as a whole. Substitute Republican and Democrat for black and white, and these formulas provide a measure of political segregation. We ran the numbers for all the counties in the United States, and a pattern emerged.5 From 1948 to 1976, the vote jumped around, but in the close elections, Republicans and Democrats became more evenly mixed, especially in the 1976 contest (see Table 1.1). After 1976, the trend was for Republicans and Democrats to grow more geographically segregated.

  The simplest way to describe this political big sort was to look across time at the proportion of voters who lived in landslide counties—counties where one party won by 20 percentage points or more. There were elections when the entire country seemed to side with one party or the other. In the electoral blowouts of 1964, 1972, and 1984, close to six out often voters lived in landslide counties. Landslide elections produced a lot of landslide communities.

  Competitive elections provided a more accurate picture of where Republicans and Democrats were living. The 1976 election between President Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter took place at the time after World War II when Americans were most likely to live, work, or worship with people who supported a different political party. Just over 26 percent of the nation's voters lived in landslide counties.

  Then the country began segregating. In 1992, 37.7 percent of American voters lived in landslide counties. By 2000, that number had risen to 45.3 percent. There was a difference between the elections prior to 1976 and those that came after. In the polarizing, and close, 1968 election between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, 37.2 percent of voters lived in landslide counties. The last five presidential elections have all had a higher percentage of voters living in landslide counties than in 1968. Beginning in 1992, the percentage of people living in landslide counties began an upward, stairstep progression. And by 2004, in one of the closest presidential contests in history, 48.3 percent of voters lived in communities where the election wasn't close at all.

  Table 1.1 Close Elections, Local Landslides

  In competitive elections, more voters are living

  in counties with lopsided presidential votes.

  Percent of voters in landslide counties

  Competitive elections Uncompetitive elections Victory margin

  1948 35.8 4.7

  1952 39.9 10.9

  1956 46.6 15.5

  1960 32.9 0.2

  1964 63.5 22.7

  1968 37.2 0.8

  1972 59.0 23.6

  1976 26.8 2.1

  1980 41.8 10.6

  1984 55.0 18.3

  1988 41.7 7.8

  1992 37.7 6.9

  1996 42.1 9.5

  2000 45.3 0.5

  2004 48.3 2.5

  Note: This table shows the proportion of voters living in counties where the local presidential election was decided by 20 or more percentage points. Competitive elections are those decided by 10 percentage points or fewer. (Third-party votes aren't included.)

  Source: Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, http://www.uselectionatlas.org.

  To get a sense of the magnitude of this segregation by political party, we asked John Logan, then at the State University of New York at Albany, to measure the segregation of blacks and whites from 1980 to 2000 in all U.S. counties. In those twenty years, counties had become slightly less racially segregated. Using the same formula, however, from 1980 to 2000 the segregation of Republicans and Democrats increased by about 26 percent.6 The trend didn't appear to be connected to the seesawing fortunes of the national parties. The increasing political segregation of American communities continued on through the Reagan landslides, the Democratic turnaround in 1986, the Clinton resurgence, the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and the Bush wins in 2000 and 2004. Moreover, this trend—one that was particularly strong beginning in the 1990s—had escaped the attention of those who study and write about politics.7

  The one political scientist who best understood the power of migration and the importance of community to politics was James Gimpel of the University of Maryland. Gimpel had written a book about the different migration paths followed by immigrants and U.S. citizens. Gimpel argued that migration was shaping communities and altering their politics. And in 2003, he wrote another book showing states to be "patchworks" of quite different and sometimes quite homogeneous communities.8 Gimpel's work gave us confidence that migration could be shaping the complexion of a community's politics. What nobody had seen, however, was that most of America and most Americans were engaged in a thirty-year movement toward more homogeneous ways of living—that the polarization so apparent in the way political leaders talked was reflected in the way Americans lived.

  Bob Cushing and I published these initial findings in a series of newspaper articles in the summer and fall of 2004. In the months after the 2004 election, we reconsidered what we had written for the paper. We knew that the pattern was clear. But was it meaningful? Did it matter that our communities were becoming more politically homogeneous? The country was polarized during the Civil War, but compared to those times, our own circumstances didn't appear dire. Furthermore, assuming that these demographic shifts did matter, why would they be happening now?

  The last question was particularly perplexing. Certainly, in earlier years, the bonds of class, ethnicity, religion, and occupation, or the barriers of geography, had restricted movement and enforced a rough kind of segregation. But those previous periods of political polarization had come before the automobile, the interstate highway system, Social Security and other safety-net programs, commercial air transportation, widespread higher education, and laws enforcing racial equity. Americans now had unprecedented choice about where and how they wanted to live. They had incredible physical and economic mobility—but these freedoms seemed only to have increased segregation, not lessened it. Why?

  These were the questions that led us to begin work on this book. We knew, however, that before we could address these larger subjects, we had to go back and reconsider the limitations of our evidence and develop ways to cross-check our findings. We were tracking both migration and political preference, something that wasn't commonly done. We knew that people moved and places changed, but we couldn't be certain that those who moved were the ones who had created the difference. So we launched another round of research. We gathered more data and delved into social theory, political history, and social psychology. We unearthed a significant amount of evidence that people's religious faith and politics helped explain where they lived. For example, we discovered that people who left counties with large numbers of Evangelicals rarely moved to counties dominated by Democrats. People who left co
unties with a high proportion of Evangelicals largely moved to counties of like faith. Similarly, we found that when people moved from Republican counties, they were very likely to settle in other Republican counties. We happened upon this relationship again and again. There were patterns of migration, and they were linked to culture, faith, and politics.

  The more we looked, the more it became clear that migration itself wasn't driving the country's political segregation. We were seeing something more basic—a cultural shift powered by prosperity and economic security. Freed from want and worry, people were reordering their lives around their values, their tastes, and their beliefs. They were clustering in communities of like-mindedness, and not just geographically. Churches grew more politically homogeneous during this time, and so did civic clubs, volunteer organizations, and, dramatically, political parties. People weren't simply moving. The whole society was changing. Prosperity had altered what people wanted out of life and what they expected from their government, their churches, and their neighborhoods. The Big Sort was big because it constituted a social and economic reordering around values, ways of life, and communities of interest. That's why when we looked back over the thirty-year period when communities had become increasingly Democratic or Republican, we found an uncanny confluence of events. The political segregation of communities from the mid-1970s through the 2004 election coincided with a number of other social and economic transformations. Political leaders were growing more extreme during this period, as Democrats and Republicans in Congress became more ideological, less moderate, and more partisan. Churches, clubs, and the economy were all going through a very similar kind of ideological reorganization. Also, after decades when prosperity had spread more evenly throughout the nation, the U.S. economy had begun to diverge into regions of winners and losers.

  The culture was changing at the top, among political and social elites, and at the bottom, among millions of Americans who were busy tailoring the ways they lived, worked, and worshiped. The polarization so apparent among political leaders was reprised and reinforced by the economy, the church, and civic institutions. And what we discovered was that all these features of contemporary life, this shift in the culture, was made manifest in the Big Sort—that is, in the nation's geography, in the places people were living. The Big Sort, then, is not simply about political partisanship, about how Americans vote every couple of years. It is a division in what they value, in how they worship, and in what they expect out of life.

  It's not surprising, perhaps, that people in marketing picked up on these shifts long before political analysts did. Political writers prefer to look at demographic groupings when interpreting elections. How did young white women vote? What happened with union workers? Marketing specialists learned that these kinds of demographic features have less and less meaning. Increasingly, they see the United States sorting itself into communities of interest—enclaves defined more by similar beliefs or ways of life than by age, employment, or income. Chris Riley is a Portland, Oregon, marketing expert who has worked with Nike, Microsoft, and now Apple. At Nike and Apple, Riley said, marketing departments are giving up on traditional demographic designations because they don't fit the way people live. "I'm not allowed to use market research information, by dictate of [Apple founder] Steve Jobs," Riley told me. "They don't trust it." They don't trust it because simple demography doesn't get at the way people live today. "There is no [demographic] category for somebody who shapes his entire life around his concern for the environment," Riley explained.

  Marketing analyst J. Walker Smith described the same phenomenon as extreme and widespread "self-invention," a desire to shape and control our identities and surroundings. Technology, migration, and material abundance all allow people to "wrap themselves into cocoons entirely of their own making," Smith wrote.9 People are unwilling to live with trade-offs, he said. So they are "re-creating their environments to fit what they want in all kinds of ways, and one of the ways is they are finding communities that fit their values—where they don't have to live with neighbors or community groups that might force them to compromise their principles or their tastes."

  It would be a dull country, of course, if every place were like every other. It's a joy that I can go to the Elks lodge pool in Austin to see the H2H0S, a feminist synchronized swimming troupe accompanied by a punkish band, or that I can visit the Zapalac Arena outside my old hometown of Smithville, Texas, to watch a team calf roping. Those sorts of differences are not only vital for the nation's democratic health, but they also are essential for economic growth. Monocultures die.

  What's happened, however, is that ways of life now have a distinct politics and a distinct geography. Feminist synchronized swimmers belong to one political party and live over here, and calf ropers belong to another party and live over there. As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups. We all live with the results: balkanized communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible; a growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible; and politics so polarized that Congress is stymied and elections are no longer just contests over policies, but bitter choices between ways of life.

  There are no easy-as-pie remedies for this dark side of the Big Sort. Time brings change, of course. Issues will arise that cut across political divisions. Providing health care for all Americans is one of those problems with solutions that don't fit within the ideological fields fenced off by either party. A particular politician may be able to bring the country together for a time. But the Big Sort isn't primarily a political phenomenon. It is the way Americans have chosen to live, an unconscious decision to cluster in communities of like-mindedness. Maybe another generation will construct communities that look very different from these. Indeed, a generational shift is already taking place. But this fractured, discordant country is my generation's creation, so it is first ours to understand and then, perhaps, to change.

  Part I

  THE POWER OF PLACE

  1. THE AGE OF POLITICAL SEGREGATION

  You don't know me, but you don't like me.

  —HOMER JOY, "Streets of Bakersfield"

  How can the polls be neck and neck when I don't know one Bush supporter?

  —ARTHUR MILLER

  IN THE SPRING before the 2004 election, I heard from LaHonda Jo Morgan. Jo Morgan lived in Wauconda, Washington, a one-building town (combination grocery, cafe, and post office) about 150 miles northwest of Spokane. She was convinced that Wauconda remained on the map "simply because mapmakers don't like to leave a lot of empty space on their products." Jo Morgan was writing about segregation—political segregation. She had seen an article I had written about the tendency of places to become politically like-minded, either increasingly Republican or Democratic. She noticed that the article came from Austin, her hometown. So she recounted that through fifty years of marriage, she had lived in a number of places across the United States and elsewhere in the world. And then she described a change she had noticed taking place in Wauconda:

  This is a predominantly conservative area with most residents tied to ranching, mining and apple orchards. A few years back I began to feel somewhat disconnected in my church community, but I chalked that up to the struggle between pre—and post—Vatican II concerns. Since the strife of the 2000 election, I became increasingly uncomfortable in conversations in a variety of situations. Perhaps I had more flexible views because of having been exposed to different cultures. In fact, I felt like a second-class citizen, not entitled to have opinions. I even wondered if I [was] becoming paranoid since being widowed.

  Of course, now I understand. Increasing divisiveness arising from political partisanship is giving rise to the same sort of treatment I observed gr
owing up in racially segregated Texas, only now it is directed at people who think differently from the majority population of an area. Sort of scary, isn't it?

  Jo Morgan was right about Wauconda changing. In 1976, Okanogan County in Washington had split fifty-fifty in the nearly fifty-fifty race between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. That made sense. Americans in 1976 were more likely to live close to somebody who voted differently from themselves than at any time since the end of World War II. And then, like the rest of the country, Jo Morgan's community changed. Okanogan County went for Clinton in 1992 and then veered Republican, strongly so, in the next three elections. In 2000, 68 percent of Okanogan County voted for George W. Bush. No wonder Jo Morgan felt lonely.

  Bonfire of the Yard Signs

  But "scary"? I kept a file of the more outrageous examples of political anger in 2004. They ranged from the psychotic to the merely sad. There was the Sarasota, Florida, man who swerved his Cadillac toward Representative Katherine Harris as she campaigned on a street corner. (Harris had been the Republican secretary of state in Florida during the presidential vote recount in 2000.) "I was exercising my political expression," Barry Seltzer told police.1 The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported just a week before the election that "when an 18-year-old couldn't convince his girlfriend that George W. Bush was the right choice for president, he became enraged, put a screwdriver to her throat and threatened to kill her." The man told her that if she didn't change her vote, she wouldn't "live to see the next election."2 Two old friends arguing about the war in Iraq at an Eastern Kentucky flea market both pulled their guns when they got tired of talking. Douglas Moore, age sixty-five, killed Harold Wayne Smith because, a witness said, "Doug was just quicker."3