Burnt Orange Report

April 27, 2004

The Self-Segregation of America into Red and Blue

By Byron LaMasters

Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a great front page story on "Red America" (the second in a series of three) highlighting Sugarland, Texas (the home of Republican majority leader Tom DeLay). I've recently been fascinated by the divide in America between Red States and Blue States. In reality, the divide is more than Red vs. Blue. The divide is between Red counties and Blue counties. Look at a map of Red Counties versus Blue counties for the 2000 election. It would be hard to imagine that Al Gore actually won more votes than George W. Bush by viewing the sea of red across much of the country. Even California, which is considered safe for Kerry after Al Gore carried the state by 1.3 Million votes saw more counties won by Bush. Gore's margin of victory came from his 800,000 vote margin from Los Angeles County, and his similar margin from Metro San Francisco (margins of 220,000 in Alameda Co. 190,000 in San Francisco Co., 140,000 in Santa Clara Co., 85,000 in San Mateo Co., and 80,000 in Contra Costa Co.).

California is just one example, though. Most of the Blue states rely on a few major population centers delivering overwhelming margins for Democrats to make them "Blue states". Just as many urban counties are delivering increasingly overwhelming margins for Democrats (Al Gore carried New York City 78%-18% in an election that ended in a virtual tie. Gore's margin was larger than the margin that Lyndon B. Johnson carried the city in his 1964 landslide victory over the far scarier, trigger-happy, anti-Civil Rights GOP nominee Barry Goldwater), rural and suburban counties have become GOP strongholds in many places.

For the first time since the late nineteenth century, there have been three consecutive presidential elections where the winner received less than 50% of the vote. I attribute this to the increasing divide in America. Why?

I'd like to write a paper on this subject, and here's what I would like to argue as my thesis:

The social movements of the second half of the twentieth century have led to the self-segregation of many subgroups of American people. This self-segregation has led to a greater divide between Red and Blue America as individuals put themselves in social surroundings that reinforce and strengthen, rather than challenge their political viewpoints.

There are several glaring examples of this. The first and most significant is the "white flight" to the suburbs over busing that began in earnest in the 1970s and emerged in the 1990s with the rise of Republicans in the southern congressional elections (especially in the 1992 and 1994 elections). The Washington Post article mentioned earlier gives a great example of how this self-segregation and largely homogeneous community has led to political groupthink among residents in Sugarland, Texas.

It's Wednesday afternoon now and Stein is there with two friends, Craig Lannom and Lance May. They are three husbands, three fathers, three Bush votes, three guys watching ESPN and drinking some beers.

Round Number One:

"They make me feel like I have no hope. They make you feel like, why wake up in the morning?" Lannom says of Blue Americans he sees on TV or hears on the radio. "It's like every time I hear Al Franken speak, the world we live in is sooo bad, everything is going sooo wrong. Is it really that bad?"

"We see life as it is," May says.

"They seem bitter," Lannom says. "They just never seem happy. Every time you hear them talking, they're bitching about something."

"They're whiners," Stein agrees.

Round Two:

I have a cappuccino maker," May confesses.

"You have a what?" Stein asks.

Round Three:

"It's early in the morning, when the sun comes up behind that bank of fog," Stein says, describing his favorite thing about hunting.

"It's when you're fishing, and you look around, and you're the only guy around," May says.

"Fly fishing in Colorado. It was a religious experience," Lannom says.

Round Four:

"I feel it's safer out here. I feel it's more stable. More my kind of people," Lannom says of the appeal of Sugar Land.

"Where the grass is green and the trees are trimmed," Stein says.

"You live in planned neighborhoods where your investment is fairly safe," May says.

"The first time I put my trash out, I put it by the curb, and my neighbor came out and said, 'We don't curb our trash here in Sugar Land.' " Lannom says, laughing. "I had some cinch bugs in my front yard or something, my neighbor says, 'Craig, I want to talk to you about your brown patch.' "

"It's so predictable here," Stein says.

"But that's not bad, though," Lannom says.

"No, that's not bad," Stein says.

Time to go.

Red America. People in Red America like to feel safe, and away from the problems that exist in many cities. Jokingly, one political analyist in 2000 said that one of the best indicators of voting behavior was the proximity of a person to a Starbucks and a Wal-Mart. The greater proportion of Starbucks to people in a community, the higher the Democratic performance. The greater proportion of Wal-Marts to people of a community, the higher the Republican performance. The article also addresses family and religious issues. It's a great read, so check it out.

Of course, I like to pick on Republicans, but liberals are also guilty of self-segregation. Gays and lesbians (in particular) are likely to self-segregate themselves into cities where they are more accepted and can be more open about their sexual orientation. I'm guilty of this. I don't care if I was offered a starting salary of $100,000, I wouldn't move to somewhere like Midland, Texas, because I'd spend most of my salary getting out of there every weekend. Austin is about the smallest sized city where I can see myself living. Gays and lesbians aren't the only ones, though. We self-segregate ourselves by the universities we attend either on the right (Bob Jones, Washington and Lee) and on the left (Wesleyan, Oberlin) - just to name a few of the more extreme examples. We self-segregate ourselves by the books we read, the television we watch and the radio we listen to. The increasingly partisan political books, FOX News and right-wing talk radio (along with the emergence of the leftist Air America Radio) have seen both liberals and conservatives encourage and reinforce their ideology rather than challenge it.

The reallignment of the parties have followed these changes. Throughout much of the century, both parties had two wings. The Democratic Party had a northern liberal wing, and a southern conservative wing united by the New Deal. The Republican Party had a liberal Eastern (Rockafeller) wing and a more conservative, isolationist western wing. Evenually, these intraparty fights were decided. The western wing won control of the Republican Party with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The northern wing of the national Democratic Party won with the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were only able to win their Democratic Presidential nominations by their abandonment and denouncement of the conservative segregationalist policies of their predecessors. The party reallignment has continued to merge as conservative southern interests have alligned themselves with the Republicans, and liberal northeasterners have alligned themselves with the Democratic Party. The rise of DeLay and Gingrich from suburban "white flight" districts have come to define Republican Congressional leadership. Likewise, the election of Nancy Pelosi as Democratic House Minority leader is reflective of the evolition of the national Democratic Party.

Anyway, I'd like to research this further. Does anyone have any thoughts on my thesis?

Posted by Byron LaMasters at April 27, 2004 04:42 PM | TrackBack

Comments

http://www.texasmonthly.com/

See the May 2004 Texas Monthly article on
Sugarland.

To bad the web site does not have the graphic that the print addition has! It is a hoot.

Posted by: JC at April 27, 2004 04:34 PM

Follow the money.

Red states are subsidised by the blue states.

That's why they are full of the, "Get the government off my back...Where's my crop support check?" crap.

Posted by: Matthew Saroff at April 27, 2004 04:57 PM

The political scientists have this pretty-well documented. Thomas Dye at Florida State University called it "Corporate federalism" or "competitive federalism" 20 years ago, under which people shop for the combination of culture, services, and taxes when they locate. Alan Wolfe's ONE NATION AFTER ALL also gets at this, in terms of noting the complex weave of homogeneity that exists around the nation.

Posted by: Keith G at April 27, 2004 07:41 PM

Byron,

To really call it "self-segregation," I think you would have to study not the voting/social/etc. patterns of people that LIVE in one county versus another, as you suggest, but of the people that CHOSE TO MOVE to one county versus another.

Liberals in NYC and SF may be liberal, but they may also be born and reared there and never left. They did not "segregate themselves" - they just fit the majority demographic for their area and never left. Their location may be accident of birth - not "self-segregation."

One region may be more inherently more liberal or conservative than another, but it can be based on values & traditions in the community, which would not be a conscious decision to segregate oneself, which by definition suggests moving to one area based on the prevailing political mood of the region.

To really say that it is a "self-imposed" phenomenon, you need to study migration patterns of like minded people (as opposed to the amount of political homegeniety in any given region), which is much harder to do from a logisitical standpoint. Where do you get such data? Interviews? How do you make sure such data is scientific and represents an accurate sample?

Sorry to burst the bubble, but while it is true that we live in polarized communities, I do not think it is as simple as "self-segregation."

Posted by: WhoMe? at April 27, 2004 10:50 PM

My question that I'm trying to answer is why do we seem to be more polarized than in any time in recent memory? We've shifted from a perdominantly class-based party system to a party system much more identified with social values in the past couple of decades. Instead of a traditional rich vs. poor political party structure, we have a party structure where each party represents fundamentally different social values.

I wouldn't say that people move somewhere only because of the politcal views of that region, but look at how and why the suburbs, especially in the south were formed over the past three decades. It was very much a reaction to the "urban problems" of bad schools, school busing, crime, drugs, etc. Whether the decisions to segregate oneself out of a certain area and into another was made consciencely or not, the fact remains. America is more regionally polarized than we have been in a long time. I'd like to study migration patterns across the United States. I think that they would reflect my thesis, but I could be wrong.

Posted by: Byron L at April 27, 2004 11:33 PM

I don't know how much I buy into it; I think a lot of it isn't predicated on majority opinion as much as it is just activity level. Consider: most of the suburbs I've lived in have both Starbuck's AND Wal-Mart. And it is precisely these suburbs where the Democratic Party can and must make inroads.

Start with Democratic performance in urban centers: why does it occur? Liberal activism is valued there, so people do it. Conservatives in that milieu (what few you might find) are Rockefeller Republicans for the most part, and/or eccentric (why else would they live IN THE CITY), and are less likely to participate.

Now flip it around: in the suburbs (especially around here) Conservative activism is valued: your most-likely voters are doing so because they feel a moral obligation. Suburban Liberals are notoriously sofa-prone, and this is where our opportunity lies: MOTIVATION is the key factor to turning out suburban Liberal voters, whether it be fear of downward mobility, fear of lost civil liberties (like Skinemax and Howard Stern), or fear of longer drives to the liquor store. However you slice it, these people DO exist: I'm proof; as are the gay couple across the street from my old house, and the lesbian couple around the corner from me now.

The moral of my story is BE CAREFUL: people invariably want to slice the world into black and white (or red and blue in this case) to oversimplify real problems of Hilbert-space level-of-complexity into pretty pictures. Reductivism can be a great tool, but it's just that, not an end in itself.

Posted by: Jeff at April 28, 2004 12:10 AM

The self-segregation angle has been studied for some time, particularly regarding the white-flight suburbs. Applying it to the Red/Blue divide is interesting though. Another intriguing demographic shift is the spread of retirees in rural areas. I am not sure how this relates to Red/Blue though.

The Red/Blue angle that I find interesting is representation in the U.S. House and electoral votes. Most of the low electoral states, including all of the three vote states (the states with only one representative and two senators) are Red states. Most of the high electoral states, those with 20+ votes, are Blue. This suggests that the low population Red states have a disproportionate amount of electoral votes.

The Red/Blue divide is accentuated by the winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes. If electoral votes were awarded proportionately, the whole Florida mess would have never happened because the exact count would have affected only the last electoral vote as oppossed to all of Florida's electoral votes. At first, you might think that allocating electoral votes proportionally would benefit the Ds. But, if the electoral votes had been allocated proportionately in 2000, Bush would have won with an even larger portion of electoral votes and the disparity between the popular and electoral vote would have been even greater. Proportional allocation would have allowed Bush to draw electoral votes away from Gore in big states such as California and New York.

One possible explanation for what is going on here is that the number of representatives in the U.S. House has been capped since the 30s. The U.S. House is the smallest popular national legislative body in the world. Of course, increasing the number of representatives would (a) cost money, (b) drive the small government people nuts, and (c) benefit the Blue to the detriment of the Red.

Don't hold your breath for this to happen.

Posted by: Jeb at April 28, 2004 01:14 AM

I suspect that it goes much much deeper and would suggest looking at two books. In "The Cousins War," Kevin Phillips suggests that the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War are a single conflict between two longstanding cultural traditions. In "Albion's Seed," David Hacket Fischer profiles the folkways of the four American cultural traditions; and, in particular, read the sections on the Puritans and the Scotch-Irish.

My own feeling is that the red/blue divide has deep roots in the respective folkways of these two groups and is not a recent phenomena. To my mind, the current era of political partisanship is neither unprecedented (read an account of the Jacksonian period) nor necessarily an aberration. Rather, we may just be "reverting to the mean" in the sense that the post-depression/cold war era was the aberration, representing a period in which economic dislocation and security threats fostered a bipartisanship that is breaking down now in a return to "normalcy."

What I find interesting about Bush is that he has feet in both traditions. One he was born into (and has used as his springboard into office), and the other he was “born again” into (and forms the value system that guides his decision making).

Posted by: spmtx at April 28, 2004 12:32 PM

Interesting take on it... I hadn't considered that the Cold War was an aberation to the trend of political partisanship in America. I'm certainly aware of past partisanship. Perhaps a better arguement would be that the social movements of the past half century have restored the partisanship seen before the Cold War.

I still believe that the social movements of recent decades have a lot to do with the divide between the Red and the Blue to an extent largely unseen in recent times, but there are certainly a lot of factors to it.

Posted by: Byron L at April 28, 2004 01:40 PM

You know, the Statesman ran a story on this fairly recently--I think in the last couple months, if memory serves. It examined political self-segregation on a smaller scale, though. Neighborhoods, rather than counties.
Interesting topic. It's a well-documented phenomenon.
Ah, writing a senior thesis. Good fun. I have many happy memories of mine, tinted by sleep-deprivation, caffiene, and panic. But still so satisfying.

Posted by: jen b at April 28, 2004 10:00 PM

Jeb,

You got a few points wrong. First, there are seven states with three EV's: N. Dakota, S. Dakota, Vermont, Alaska, Deleware, Montana, and Wyomoing. They aren't all Red states. DE and VT are clearly blue states, while Dems hold all four Senate seats in the Dakotas. WY, AK, and MT are pretty Red though, despite Sen. Baucus and Gov. Knowles strong challenge to Murkowski.

Second, the statement that "The U.S. House is the smallest popular national legislative body in the world" is innaccurate. The Canadian House of Commons has 308 members, or will after the new elections. Currently it is at 301. The Australian House of Representatives has 150 members. Those are the only examples that come to the top of my head, but there are probably more as well. So the U.S. House isn't aberrently small.

Aladextra

Posted by: Aladextra at April 29, 2004 03:34 PM

News, Politics, and Fun From Deep in the Heart of Texas

April 27, 2004

The Self-Segregation of America into Red and Blue

By Byron LaMasters