The Two Americas

Since the 2000 presidential elections, the United States has been a fifty-fifty nation--divided almost exactly down the middle by our political preferences. The map of the country has been colored in with the Democratic blue states of the East and West Coasts bracketing the Republican red states of the heartland. The last two presidential elections, of course, were decided by a handful of votes in a single state.

While split down the center, are American politics still essentially centrist--issues largely matters of degree and nuance--as they have been for most of the past fifty years? Or have fundamental rifts among key voting blocs opened up? The evidence suggests that there is a dramatic new level of polarization between opposing political camps in the United States--a chasm that could take many election cycles to close.

President George W. Bush's approval ratings hit an all-time low. According to the October 2005 AP/Ipsos poll, 39% of Americans give the president thumbs up for his job performance, while 58% disapprove of it--the worst showing since he first took office. Criticism of the president is highest among young people aged 18 to 29, Northeasterners, minorities, and low-income voters.

Approval of the president's performance on specific issues, whether it be his handling of the economy, the situation in Iraq, social issues, or foreign policy and the war on terrorism, is also at or very near the lowest point since the beginning of his administration in January 2001.

Other presidents have suffered from poor public approval ratings, too--Johnson in the 1960s, Nixon and Carter in the 1970s, the elder Bush in the early 1990s--but what is dramatically different today is how intensely partisan Americans' views of the president and his policies have become. Among Republicans, 81% approve of President Bush's job performance; among Democrats, merely 10% agree with that positive assessment (and 90% disapprove of his performance); Independents, predictably, fall between the two major political parties, but their 33% approval rating for the president is certainly much closer to the Democratic view than the Republican one. The same patterns and same enormous differences hold when it comes to specific administration policies as well.

Such fierce partisanship might be expected given the controversies currently surrounding the Bush administration and the political challenges it now faces, but the deep divide separating Republicans and Democrats also extends to a more fundamental issue: the general direction that the United States is taking.

Just 28% of Americans now think the country is heading in the "right direction," while 66% feel it has gotten off on the "wrong track." This question, often called the best measure of the nation's mood, has registered lower levels of "right direction" responses before, notably in the early 1980s, when the country was in the grips of the second OPEC-induced recession, spiraling gas prices, high inflation and interest rates, and the Iranian hostage crisis. But even then, the Republican/Democrat partisan divide was much narrower.

Today, 60% of Republicans believe the country is headed in the right direction, but only 8% of Democrats (and 18% of Independents) agree. That whopping 52 percentage-point gap between Republicans and Democrats (and 42 points between Republicans and Independents) is perhaps the largest ever. In February 1982, when just 27% of all Americans thought the country was headed in the right direction, the Republican/Democratic split was a much narrower 36 points.

America is now a seriously divided nation. The political consensus has broken down over policies, leadership, and the future.

This suggests that the United States is headed into a period of especially tumultuous politics. Basic issues concerning social, economic and foreign policy are likely to become more intractable and less subject to compromise. And the political discourse in the 2006 mid-term elections and 2008 presidential election will probably focus more on fundamental issues, like the proper role of government and the place of America in the world, even as the campaign language becomes ever more acrimonious. It promises to be a wild ride in the years ahead.