The Big Sort

by Bill Bishop

  Minnesota Not-So-Nice

  "Hey, Sheila, it's time for you to be a true independent." With that, Minnesota senate minority leader Dick Day told state senator Sheila Kisca den that she would have to vacate her office, the one she had shared for twelve years with other Republican state senators. Day called a sergeant at arms, and Kiscaden was escorted out of her office and out of the Republican Party.

  Kiscaden recounted the story as she slid a pan of bran muffins from the oven at her house in Rochester, Minnesota. There's butter, thick coffee, and a conversation about how a three-term state senator could be ushered from her office because she failed to color within the lines prescribed by the Republican Party. In today's politics, Kiscaden is an unlikely Republican. She's a former board member of Planned Parenthood. A book by liberal theologian Jim Wallis rests under her reading lamp. In 1994, she voted to protect gay, lesbian, and transsexual state employees from discrimination. She is pro-choice and is open to the idea of gun control.

  Kiscaden ran as a Republican for the state senate in 1992 for what is now an old-fashioned reason. Democrats "weren't being fiscally responsible," she said. But Republican Party ideology was narrowing, soon to the exclusion of mere fiscal conservatives. In Minnesota, where local conventions make party endorsements, several right-wing groups banded together against Kiscaden. After ten years of her moderate partisanship, they'd had enough. In 2002, the National Rifle Association (NRA) and a conservative education organization jammed the local nominating caucus in Rochester. "I went to the endorsing convention, and the gun guys were out," Kiscaden recalled. "Some came up and said, 'We gotcha. We've got rid of you."'

  They nearly did. The Republican Party successfully denied Kiscaden an endorsement and an automatic place on the ballot. She acknowledged that she wasn't alone; these purges had been taking place all over the state. The party had rejected moderate Republican state senator Martha Robertson two years earlier, replacing her with a conservative football coach. Twice censured by his local party for supporting gay rights and statewide education standards, state senator Dean Johnson, a Lutheran minister and National Guard chaplain, left the Republican Party in 2000 after two decades in office.31 It wasn't simply district-level extremists who were eager to purify the Minnesota GOP. It was the state party's leaders. The Republican executive committee said that it would withhold funds from the local party organizations if they nominated either Kiscaden or Robertson. Kiscaden ran in 2002 as a member of the Independence Party and won. She caucused with Republicans until 2004, when the minority leader grew convinced that Kiscaden had disclosed the party's secret strategy on a spending bill to some people in Rochester. Basically, Kiscaden just didn't fit in. Dick Day told her to move her office and promised to spend $200,000 to beat her if she ran again in 2006.32

  Kiscaden was born just after World War II in St. Paul. Her father was a house painter, and her mother was a nurse's aide. She was the oldest of four children growing up in a two-bedroom house. She paid her way through college, married, worked, and volunteered with an international development group. She drove a battered Mercury Sable around her district, and the bran muffin recipe was her grandmother's. Her troubles began when the Republican Party concluded, Kiscaden said, that "I wasn't pure enough." She didn't mean that in a Joan of Arc kind of way. "It's not about Sheila Kiscaden. It's not about me," she explained. "It's about big political forces that are going on in our country. And I just got caught up in it."

  Extreme Districts, Partisan Candidates

  Sandy Maisel, chair of the government department at Colby College, studies Congress. In the 1990s, Maisel set out to understand why some people decide to become candidates for political office and others don't. He picked a random set of congressional districts and asked prominent residents of these communities—labor leaders, party officials, chamber of commerce presidents—to name people who would be good members of Congress. Maisel and his colleagues then interviewed 1,500 of these prominent, well-thought-of citizens about the pros and cons of running for the U.S. House of Representatives. Most of the objections to entering politics were expected. Running meant interrupting careers, leaving families, and losing free time. Few of these good citizens wanted to raise money. They weren't naive, however, and most said that they could put up with the fundraising calls and the time on the road, even if the process was hard and, at times, distasteful. There was something more fundamental that bothered these potential candidates, however: the politically lopsided nature of most congressional districts.

  Single-minded districts deterred those in the minority party, which made sense. These potential candidates had slim chances of winning. But one-sided districts put off people in the majority party, too. They simply "didn't like the kind of campaigns they would have to run to get the nomination," Maisel told me. The prospective candidates understood that a primary campaign in a homogeneous district would likely be "bitter and acerbic," Maisel found. They sensed the campaign "would be extreme, and most of the issues these people were concerned with were not at the extreme."

  The prominent citizens Maisel interviewed were right about the narrow limits of what the parties will accept in a candidate. Back in Oregon, Bill Bellamy calculated the ideological boundaries of today's politics. "On a scale of one to ten from conservative to liberal, the Republican Party starts at one and stops at three," Bellamy told me. "There is just no such thing as a liberal Republican. Now, if you get to three or four, then the ones and twos start claiming you're a liberal." As a Republican, either you get back to three (or, better, two) or you don't run.

  When Sheila Kiscaden went to her party caucus in 2002, she expected to see twenty or so constituents and neighbors. She was greeted by more than two hundred people rounded up by the NRA and a conservative education group. To win the nomination, Kiscaden had to please those "ones and twos"—something she was not willing to do. As Maisel said, "you get people who are interested in issues at the extreme." Those are your candidates.

  Steroidal Federalism

  Congress had given up governing by the summer of 2006. And not a whole lot had been happening before. Nelson Polsby, a congressional scholar, calculated that the federal government had been largely deadlocked since the late 1960s. It was as if Americans had lost the ability to speak a common civic tongue. Polsby wrote, "In important respects the U.S. population resembles the population that attempted to build the Tower of Babel."33 By 2006, even the slow-moving wheels of government had seized up. In June, Charles Babington wrote in the Washington Post, "Congress seems to be struggling lately to carry out its most basic mission: passing legislation."34 Whatever the issue—the minimum wage, immigration reform, bankrupt pensions, global warming, energy policy, stem cell research, inquiries into domestic surveillance, resolutions on the war in Iraq—it slipped under the surface of Congress's deepening pool of discord. In early July, former House Republican leader Dick Armey said bluntly, "I'm not sure what this Congress has accomplished."35 So Congress quit pretending and just stopped meeting. In 2006, the House met nine fewer days than it had in 1948, the year President Harry Truman dubbed the legislature the "do-nothing Congress."

  In the past, when the nation had failed to reach a consensus, the custom was for local governments to strike out on their own. In the early part of the twentieth century, Progressive majorities in the Midwest by-passed a polarized Congress and enacted laws governing railroad rates, limiting corruption, and promoting conservation.36 The same thing is happening now. With Congress more polarized than at any time since the end of World War II, people see no sense waiting for the national fifty-fifty division to resolve itself. After all, one of the advantages of living in a like-minded community is that you can live under the laws you and your neighbors want. The federal stalemate has touched off an eruption of activity by state and local governments—federalism that doesn't sleep.

  Abortion. South Dakota's legislature made it a felony for a doctor to perform an abortion for any reason except to save the life of a pregnant woman. (
This stark law was defeated in a 2006 statewide referendum; 56 percent of South Dakota's voters cast ballots against the bill.)

  Birth Control. In early 2006, while the federal Food and Drug Administration dithered over the legality of the "morning-after" birth control pill, more than sixty bills were filed in state legislatures to settle the issue locally. "The resulting tug of war is creating an availability map for the pill that looks increasingly similar to the map of 'red states' and 'blue states' in the past two presidential elections," reported Marc Kaufman in the Washington Post, "with increased access in the blue states and greater restrictions in the red ones."37

  Gay Unions. Very blue Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage, and (also blue) Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, and California allow some form of same-sex unions. Meanwhile, half of the states have banned them.

  Guns. Florida passed the "Stand Your Ground" act in 2005, which allows citizens of that red state to kill in self-defense without first attempting to flee. By mid-2006, fifteen states had enacted similar laws. Nearly all were Republican-leaning states in the South and Midwest.38

  Education.

  California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill passed by the California legislature that would have prohibited textbooks or school instruction that "reflect adversely" on gays and lesbians.

  After 6,000 people signed a petition asking for an elective high school course on the Bible, the Odessa, Texas, board of education added the course to the curriculum.39

  Meanwhile, students in Philadelphia's public schools are required to take a course in black history.40

  In 2007, the Federal Way school district in exurban Seattle banned the showing of Al Gore's global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.41

  The Environment. After the Bush administration decided it had no authority to regulate greenhouse gases, blue America sued. A coalition of twelve states—all but one of which voted Democratic in the last two presidential elections—two bright blue cities, and thirteen environmental groups asked the courts to intervene. In April 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the states and ordered the federal government to begin regulating the gases that are warming the planet. Meanwhile, in mid-2006, ten northeastern states were negotiating caps for greenhouse gases. California, Oregon, and Washington were setting up similar ceilings on the Democratic Pacific Coast.42 And cities—the urban voters who largely supported Al Gore and John Kerry—are "racing ahead of the federal government in setting carbon emission targets and developing strategies to deal with climate change," according to a story in the Washington Post. By June 2007, 522 U.S. mayors had agreed to meet the goals set out in the Kyoto Protocol, including those from deeply Democratic Boston, New York, Boulder (Colorado), Seattle, Portland (Oregon), and Austin.43

  The most popular tactic in the age of political segregation is to start locally, with overwhelming majorities, and work your way up. Andrew McDonald, the Connecticut state senator who sponsored a successful gay union bill, said that the state's action sent "a powerful message to the rest of the country ... Everybody understood that this was not just a Connecticut issue, that this was going to serve as a platform for many other discussions and debates around the country." One of the ironies of political segregation is that it's turned Democrats into the party of states' rights, while Republicans, when they still had their congressional majorities, were more inclined toward federal mandates. "State sovereignty, once the discredited viewpoint of segregationists, is now becoming the battle cry of mainstream liberals," wrote political scientist James Gimpel. "Conservatives, for their part, are now citing the constitutional views of government centralizers they once despised."44

  After the federal government allowed only limited kinds of stem cell research and Congress was unable to resolve the dispute between researchers and the religious right, the states stepped in. California voted $3 billion for stem cell research, and other blue states—Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, and Connecticut—provided funding, too. Stem cell research is now clearly a Democratic cause, but that seems more a consequence of divided politics than of either ideology or biomedical research. After all, the first town to place limits on DNA research was Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of the most liberal cities in the United States nearly outlawed genetic research in 1977. "Originally, you evaluated recombinant DNA technology the same way you would evaluate a new kind of pesticide or a large dam," Marcy Darnovsky, associate executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in San Francisco, told me in 2005. When the religious right came out against embryonic stem cell research, however, it created "this reflexive response to that religious point of view. What's happened is fascinating."

  The opposition of the religious right and President George W. Bush turned stem cell research into a Democratic bugle call, but the sides could have been reversed. After all, without the opposition of the religious right, isn't it possible that the $3 billion California stem cell initiative would have been couched as a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry and Frankenstein research? Instead, the stem cell initiative became a surrogate for the presidential contest between Bush and Kerry. In August 2004, a Field poll found that two-thirds of the people who supported Kerry also supported the stem cell initiative. Two-thirds of those who said they favored Bush said they would vote against the proposition.*45

  California's position on stem cell research also sent a broader signal about the state's culture and the kind of people who would find comfort within its borders. It said that California is not dominated by Bush Republicans or the religious right. Those kinds of signals affect decisions about migration, which in turn increase social homogeneity. People want to live in places where their work and their point of view are respected.

  In 2005, the Texas legislature was considering a bill to limit stem cell research in the state. One medical school dean told legislators that if they passed the bill, Texas would hear a "giant sucking sound" as scientists from Houston decamped to California. I drove to the huge medical research complex that fills blocks of downtown Houston, and the researchers I talked with there were naturally worried that Texas would outlaw their work. But that wasn't their greatest concern. More than the money or the law was a sense that the scientists didn't want to live where they weren't wanted. "If your state is going to make it miserable for you not just in the absence of support but in the presence of political disdain, people are going to leave," said Michael Mancini, a research scientist at the Baylor College of Medicine. "If science is seen as evil, with monsters, it means we'll have to go elsewhere."

  In 2002, researchers at the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan surveyed scientists about constraints on their work. The scientists were concerned, of course, that new laws could end entire lines of research. But the survey found that they were most affected by "informal constraints," the sense that society disapproved of what they were doing. The researchers realized there was such a thing as "forbidden knowledge" in some societies. They were less concerned about laws and more worried about what the press would say about them or how the community where they lived would react to their research. They were much more concerned about social sanctions than legal ones. "I would like to lunatic-proof my life as much as possible," one scientist said.46

  So would we all. But these days, one town's lunatic is another town's civic leader.

  Eating in Mixed Company

  Sheila Kiscaden took me to an Italian restaurant across from the Mayo Clinic where we had an unusual lunch for the year 2005. We ate in mixed company. There were two Republican politicians, one Democrat turned independent, and Kiscaden, who by this time was a Republican turned independent thinking about turning Democrat. They had all lived through the transition from a more congenial kind of Minnesota politics to what they had in 2005—and none was pleased with the change. Tim Penny was a pro-life Democratic congressman who eventually ran for governor as an independent and lost. Duane Benson and Dave Bishop were Republican legislators, both more moderate than the current
party average. (Benson was pro-choice, which earned him the Kiscaden treatment; his local party refused to endorse him in 1988.) The four poked at a spaghetti bar lunch and listed the ways they thought they had been shunted out of the political process.

  Tim Penny summed up the situation this way: "Here's what's happening. You have districts that are self-selecting. More and more liberal-leaning and Democratic-leaning people want to live in this neighborhood or this city, and similarly the suburbs are being populated by people who are leaning more conservative. But a small percentage of these people are dominating the party and determining the candidates in these districts. The nature of the town is that they still vote for the Republican candidate, but it's not the Republican who broadly represents the more moderate constituency. As long as you keep the red-hot base happy, everybody thinks everything is fine."

  "And if you want to buck that red-hot base," chimed in Duane Benson, "you've got work. It's much easier to vote your way back in by taking care of that red-hot base and then work [to the middle] from there."

  Piece by piece, what the four described didn't sound so bad. What's wrong with living around people you like? And isn't the essence of democracy to be involved, to be passionate about politics and policy? But it was the cumulative effect that was so sinister. They portrayed a self-reinforcing cycle that squeezed people out of politics—people like themselves. The Big Sort was making places more ideologically homogeneous, and in the process, it was making people more extreme. There were fewer voters with mixed, nonpartisan relationships. Organizations with membership based on fellowship and community had been disappearing since the mid-1960s, replaced by those angry good old boys rounded up by the NRA who had greeted Kiscaden at her party caucus. And not only were communities more like-minded, but Republicans and Democrats also were more internally aligned: to be a member of a party meant agreeing up and down the line on a grocery list of issues. Politics had become so tribal that people were changing their minds about fundamental issues in order to conform to what it meant to be a Republican or a Democrat. So politicians found that if they didn't satisfy one "red-hot" portion of the party, they risked losing the votes of all who considered themselves good and true Democrats or loyal Republicans.