The State of Disunion: Regional Sources of Modern American Partisanship

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION THE 2000 U.S. presidential campaign began as a relatively forgettable season, not nearly as exciting as the parties’ respective primary seasons, but by its end it had become a drama that transfixed the nation—the world, really—for five weeks beyond election night. At its center were the major party candidates, Democrat Al Gore, the sitting vice president, and Republican George W. Bush, the governor of Texas. The voting on election night was close. By the end of the night, the race had come down to Florida. With that state’s votes still undecided , neither candidate was willing to concede the election. Over the next few days, a dispute erupted over the state’s vote returns, and the election saga expanded over weeks to include the full battalions of the parties, legions of lawyers, various Florida oficials, and judges at both the state and the federal level. In the end, the disagreement over the vote count was resolved, in unprecedented fashion, by the intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court—a decision hardly without its own controversy. Florida’s electoral votes, and with them the presidency, went to Bush. Having won the election, President-elect Bush faced a dificult political landscape. His was a victory clouded by ambiguity and contestation, and he could claim no electoral mandate as he prepared to move into ofice. Congress, his partner in lawmaking, was hardly a source of reassurance. Republicans had a remarkably slim majority in the House—just five seats—and the Senate was evenly split. Bush, who had campaigned on the promise of being“a uniter, not a divider,” now faced a country almost perfectly divided between the parties. Delivering on his campaign promise, especially after the rancor of the election, would not be easy. For his first oficial appearance as president-elect, Bush chose to speak to the nation from a podium in the chamber of the Texas State House. The setting was symbolic. Democrats controlled the Texas House, and Bush’s campaign had cited his work as governor with both Democrats and Republicans as evidence of his ability to unite across divides. The Democratic Speaker of the House, Pete Laney, introduced the new president to the country. Bush, citing the “spirit of cooperation” he had seen in that very hall, insisted that the “nation must rise above a house divided.” For his part, the president promised, “Whether you voted for me or not, I will do my best to serve your interests, and I will work to earn your respect.”1 Despite the president’s optimistic call for unity, it did not take long for the country’s deep divisions to manifest themselves. In the 2004 presidential election , as in 2000, the electorate was polarized. Election day produced higher turnout, fewer independents, and greater party unity in ballot casting than any election in recent decades, signaling the intensity of voter passions. Two years later, in the midterm elections, Democrats gained control of Congress for the first time in twelve years, yet the division of seats between the parties remained as close as it had for the prior decade. Partisan clashes on legislation still rule in Washington as well. Party-line voting in Congress has been the norm for years, and both parties have resorted to any number of rule manipulations in their efforts to defeat their opponent. Even the normally cordial Senate became embroiled in a virulent partisanship in 2005 when Republicans threatened to derail Democratic opposition to President Bush’s judicial nominees with a parliamentary maneuver nicknamed the “nuclear option.” Left and right interest groups regularly trade accusations of obduracy and malfeasance through a proliferating number of blogs, books with sensational titles, 527-sponsored advertisements , even documentaries. To describe this partisan rift, the phrase “red state–blue state divide” was coined, in reference to the geographic distribution of party support in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004.2 In both elections, Bush drew his support from the states of the South and the interior West, the so-called red states. His Democratic opponents, first Al Gore and then John Kerry, won in the North, including the Northeast and parts of the Midwest, and in the Pacific Coast states, dubbed the blue states. THE STATE OF DISUNION 2 The combination of geographic division and partisan acrimony has led pundits to marvel that politics in the new millennium appear to be taking on “the...