24 ms·

The divide between political parties is smaller than we think (2020)

79 points by undefined1 6y ago

lebrad 6y ago
In 2000, Ralph Nader supporters called this idea "the two-headed uniparty"
- Daho0n 6y ago
  I hadn't head that before. How very fitting.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Coming out of the hangover of the last 4 years, I'm starting to see clearly now how both parties work to keep people in petty conflict and intense infighting. It allows the power players to get away with so much. The MSM has 24-hour coverage of inane and petty things. Our politicians take turns with their heads in the trough and enrich themselves in the open. I don't want to leave my children a legacy of endless war and endless poverty.
harimau777 6y ago
The problem with articles like this is that what matters is how people vote not what they say their policy preferences are.
- munk-a 6y ago
  But people don't have freedom to vote as they'd like. Voting in a two party system is reduced to a "which is worse" question. If you're fiscally and socially liberal but feel very strongly about preventing abortion you might end up holding your nose while voting for the R candidate.
  - mullingitover 6y ago
    > If you're fiscally and socially liberal but feel very strongly about preventing abortion you might end up holding your nose while voting for the R candidate. Not to get into a flamewar or anything, but if you're trying to prevent abortion then voting for the R candidate isn't a sensible choice. Hand in hand with wishing to ban abortion, they generally are hostile to the very policies (free birth control, such as IUD, on demand) that are the most effective in preventing abortion. Colorado cut teen birth rate and teen abortion rate in half simply by offering free IUDs[1]. The thing with the two party system is that the real choice for voters happens in the primaries. This is the chance to swing the party in a different direction, since in the general election people will typically hold their nose and vote a straight ticket even if they don't like all the positions their candidate holds. [1] https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/PSD_TitleX3_CFPI-Report.pdf https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/PSD_Tit...
    - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
      Unfortunately there is a non-negligible percentage of those who would follow the parent comment's suggestion due to religious affiliation. Some of those would also clutch pearls when mentioning birth control, out of prolonged exposure to FUD on the topic, i.e. "think of the children!"
      - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
        Or they might be billionaires and are worried that if the birth rate continues dropping they might have to modernize their facilities or pay higher wages.
        munk-a 6y ago
        I can believe some billionaires having this opinion (since some aren't super sharp) but it's total BS. There are plenty of humans on earth - there isn't any shortage of labour out there. People over-reproducing is a strain on society. I'm not saying we should limit how many children folks can have, but there isn't any societal upside to 14 person families.
- witherk 6y ago
  Great point. Measuring the divide between parties by the issue positions their voters misses the more important things like "would you rather your party try to hold onto power or admit defeat" after an election.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  No, the problem with articles like this is that they make claims about differences in people's policy preferences without actually measuring policy preferences, just on a 1-100 scale how extreme they feel their own preferences and others are. Without objective touchstones for what 25, 50, and 75 mean on the scales between the extreme polar positions that are given as the end points, where people rate themselves numerically isn't likely to have any coherent relation to actual policy positions at all.
monocasa 6y ago
Particularly ever since the New Democrats took over the party. Their whole shtick was injecting a bunch of right wing policies into the Democratic Party, under the idea that voters had shifted to the right and the only way to win was to follow them. Clinton made good on his promise to "end the welfare system as we know it". Obamacare was an unashamed rewrite of Newt Gingich and The Heritage Foundation's 1993/1994 HEART Act, all the way to the individual mandate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Democrats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Democrats IMO a lot of the both party's issues right now stem from the fact that Democrats have moved so far to the right that only the far right positions differentiate a Republican from a mainline Democrat opponent.
- minikites 6y ago
  I think this is a great analysis. One factor I would add to both your comment and about the political divide in general is earmarks. Eliminating earmarks (political "pork" in bills) seems like a great way to eliminate wasteful spending. Except now we're in a situation where many of our representatives and senators can't point to a new bridge and say "I'm the reason we have that, now re-elect me" so they move to culture war issues as a way to fire up the base. This effect, combined with gerrymandering for House seats, means that the only thing many politicians have to fear is a primary fight. In an effort to avoid primary challengers, the Democrats and Republicans both ran to the right, leaving us where we are now: Biden, a Republican by 1960s standards, is painted as a "radical socialist" against all evidence, because it turns out the base, because there's literally nothing else for politicians to offer to their constituents. I've heard rumblings that earmarks might be coming back and I really hope they do.
- adventured 6y ago
  The Republicans have moved very far to the left over the past 30-40 years, from where they used to be. Topics no longer up for serious discussion in the Republican Party that used to be very common: Doing away with Social Security / replacing SS. Getting rid of Medicare and Medicaid, replacing them with entirely private systems. The gold standard, going back to it. Cutting spending (actually attempting to do it, not just paying rare lip service to it). Getting more aggressive with the war on drugs. Increasing punishment for crime, putting people into prison for longer sentences. It was George W Bush's administration that implemented the successful Housing First program for homelessness assistance, which would have been considered an exceptionally bad welfare state program by the 1980s Republicans. Back then it would have been considered to encourage homelessness, they would have said it entrenches it. Today's Republicans support rampant welfare give-aways in the form of stimulus checks. That would have been considered a crazy Socialist program universally by Republicans just as recently as the early 1990s. Giving people checks during a recession was unthinkable by Republicans as recently as 20 years ago (eg the 2001-2002 recession). Trump - with wide Republican support - just implemented the best criminal justice reform in US history. That would have gotten near zero Republican support in the 1980s. The Republicans in Reagan's time were very militantly against gay marriage, and any form of sexuality being shown anywhere at any time. In the early 1990s Murphy Brown - a fictional TV character - deciding to raise a child on her own was a very controversial matter among Republicans, so much so that Dan Quayle made it a prominent issue. Republicans just 30 years ago were radically more conservative than they are today and that's putting it mildly. Those same Reagan era Republicans were almost universally - with very few exceptions - strongly in favor of the war on drugs. Every other word out of their mouths was about how to further criminalize drugs. Today the exact opposite is true, very few Republicans are in favor of the war on drugs. Trump just came and went and the Republicans barely lifted an eyebrow at trying to roll back the positive momentum of drug liberalization. If people on the left think Republicans today are far right, well, ha. They don't remember what Republicans were like back then apparently. Today's average Republican is a centrist Democrat circa the mid 1980s and early 1990s.
eyelidlessness 6y ago
This would be great news if everyone were invested in minimizing polarization and detoxing the political conflicts that we’re facing. But that’s not the case. The biggest divide between the “parties” (which isn’t political in nature and has nothing to do with the very real and significant differences between the parties) is that one sees polarization as a tool and the other doesn’t acknowledge that. On Twitter, this has been exceedingly shorthanded into “tan suit”. One party is so invested in conflict that they invent it by manufacturing a scandal out of a fashion choice. The other is so invested in conflict avoidance that it pathologically refuses to hold the first accountable for anything meaningful. In other words the divide isn’t political, it’s about ambition and shrewdness. This won’t be overcome by finding common ground. Edit: added a comma because it would’ve driven me nuts not to. Also to add a reasonable disclaimer that I’m not philosophically a member of either party, but I caucus/coalition with the one I obviously perceive to not be fundamentally bellicose. Edit 2: well since it needed clarification, I consider the Republican Party to be the bellicose one and the Democratic Party to be the spineless one.
- witherk 6y ago
  Interesting, what are some things that you think democrats could do to hold republicans accountable?
  - munk-a 6y ago
    I think Dems have an uphill battle to fight - media seems strongly slanted against liberal policies as evidenced by the lack of deficit spending being anywhere in the debate when tax cuts were happening compared to deficit spending to address the viral crisis. There are entrenched interests that will put a lot of messaging toward suppressing discussions of liberal policies.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      > media seems strongly slanted against liberal policies Um... what? If you think media is strongly slanted against liberal policies, look at how it treats conservative policies.
jdavis703 6y ago
While using a scale to measure divide on particular issues such as open vs closed borders is interesting, the part about “disliking” opposing partisans seems to be an inappropriate way to measure political distance. For example a Black Democrat voter probably thinks Republican voters don’t like her because she’s Black, not because she’s a Democrat. Regardless this shows there’s room for compromise on certain hard policy issues, but soft issues (i.e. the culture wars) requires more nuanced study.
Daho0n 6y ago
For the life of me I cannot see why this article is written in a positive light. The result is pretty clear: Members of the two parties hate each other less in reality than they think they do and they are actually closer than they think. "Hey you know what? The two only real options we have in an election doesn't actually disagree as much as you'd think!" How is that a good thing? With only two options they better be far apart or those left-leaning on the right and those that are right-leaning on the left starts to blend together and you have one party in reality with two names and two outer wings that hate each others guts. At least as one party they might work better together (hah, okay sorry that was stupid).
- livueta 6y ago
  Yeah, an interesting implication of a lack of substantive policy differences is that policy-heavy partisans on either side are going to be disappointed - the necessities of tribalism generate a lot of noise and rage around controversial issues, but when it comes down to actual policy there's no appetite. I saw an interesting example of this first-hand last year. I live in a pretty bougie area, kind of place where everyone's car radio (and everyone owns a car) is pegged to the local NPR station. BLM signs went up like mushrooms - sure, neat. Then, the local school levy election rolls around. Most of the same properties grow "Vote Yes For Kids!" signs. We even get "vote yes" mailers explaining that since the state only funds "basic education", we've got to top up our local schools to do right by our kids. Of course, any discussion of how areas without fat property tax revenues get by is conspicuously absent. There is not a lot of appreciation of the irony of holding these positions simultaneously. Words (and yard signs, I guess) are cheap but policy might actually impact upper-middle-class WASP QoL; can't be having that.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I think a common reason behind this (and I've find myself doing this) is that when the most extreme elements of your preferred party do something crazy and outlandish, you have a tendency to push it aside and think "that's only the fringe of my party", but when you see it on the other side, you think "Anyone who could even think of being on the same side as those nutjobs is evil." That is, most folks have a tendency to personify themselves with the middle of their party, but personify those in the other party as the extreme of that party.
- neartheplain 6y ago
  “Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions.” https://time.com/4403510/george-w-bush-speech-dallas-shooting-memorial-service/ https://time.com/4403510/george-w-bush-speech-dallas-shootin...
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    "Ultimate attribution error is the tendency to internally attribute negative outgroup and positive ingroup behaviour and to externally attribute positive outgroup and negative ingroup behaviour. So in other words, ultimate attribution error arises as a way to explain an outgroup's negative behaviour as flaws in their personality, and to explain an outgroup's positive behaviour as a result of chance or circumstance." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error
- minikites 6y ago
  I don't disagree with this in abstract but I think the idea that both sides have extreme elements that are in any way comparable died on January 6th. There's a difference between Bernie Sanders and Marjorie Taylor Greene, but a lot of people don't see it that way because they're uncomfortable being in the same group as Marjorie Taylor Greene. I think the Republicans have a responsibility to address this and I don't think the Democrats are in a similarly dire situation.
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EEMac 6y ago
This frustrates a LOT of people who want more political difference expressed than the two parties exhibit.
Daho0n 6y ago
I wish we had a tool, like the political compass, that those who run for (re-)election had to fill out by law before they could run. As it is now no one have any idea where different candidates are on the political spectrum as all they do is talk in soundbites and repeat their slogans over and over again.
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
  Unfortunately this would effectively pin down a candidate to their word and past promises they may have made - most politicians seem to avoid doing that when possible ;)
orthecreedence 6y ago
It's a perceived difference between two wings of the "capitalist imperialist" party stoked by media outlets following the money by realizing that people click more when they're outraged. No, both parties are not the same if you're a centrist, but from the far left side of things, you definitely need your spectacles on to see the difference. Granted, one faction tends to be on the right side of history/civil rights a lot more. If we're interested in real reconciliation within the current system, I'd definitely advocate for state and nation-wide voter reform. Some sort of proportional representation voting protocol would allow people to pick representatives that argue on behalf of maybe 50-80% of their beliefs, rather than 10-20% of their beliefs. I know that when "my person" wins, I never feel like they're going to particularly represent me or the people I care about in any impactful way. I think the perception that there are only two real choices stokes the divide quite a bit, because being either with us or against us is a lot easier when there are only two teams. Breaking up the two party system with voter reform would be my #1 fix. That, and reversing Citizens United.
vmception 6y ago
great graphs for that example I've found the same thing because I neither deflect talking points, nor do I immediately block people that don't match my talking point and then I make the cardinal sin of saying "both sides are doing this" and that simply makes both sides dehumanize me when its fairly clear they haven't really talked to each other in a while to come up with an accurate rebuttal depolarize yourself kthx
titzer 6y ago
The divide is not going to be fixed without disrupting the connection between outrage and political donations. Until that is addressed there is massive financial incentive in making people as angry as possible and it will continue to get worse.
azinman2 6y ago
"Second, we can engage with leaders and the media who may be exacerbating Americans’ misperceptions of each other." Can we? Right now the fundamental model of media AND political parties is fueled by hyper-partisanship, outrage, us-vs-them, and how all of these things combine to solicit eyeballs and keep them on us and not them. Sean Hannity or one of the other talking heads at Fox (can't remember which) literally has or at least had a nightly segment on how all other media is lying to you or not covering what Fox covers, and thus they're bad so stick with us. It's like a meta-advertisement couched as opinionews. These things _work_ to accomplish the goals (eyeballs on us), even if they're destroying the country in the process. So how is a conversation going to change any of that?
Tycho 6y ago
I'd expect them to be close. In a two party system, the parties will coalesce around similar policies. The electorate will always have variance along the first principal component (which probably corresponds to community prosperity vs individual comfort), and the parties will project in opposite directions, but nevertheless staying close to the centre.
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dragonwriter 6y ago
Trying to assess actual policy disagreements by putting the polar extremes at 0 and 100 and having people pick a number in between for their actual policy preference without any concrete touchpoints for what those intermediary value means doesn't work. Your aren't comparing Republicans and Democrats policy positions, you are comparing Republicans and Democrats views of the relative extremism of their own policy positions and those of the other parties. A valid summary is not that the actual differences in policy preferences are smaller than expected, but that members of each party see their own positions as less extreme and the other parties positions as more extreme than members of the other party do. Which is very much not news, and doesn't actually indicate anyone is overestimating real policy divides as the authors claim. Their methodology could not, even remotely, support the basic claims they are making.
jleyank 6y ago
This is not an appropriate article or discussion for HN. There's lots of other places to "be political". Not so many to "be technical"... It would be a great disappointment to see HN turn into, say, Slashdot.
- bitstan 6y ago
  It's a great article for HN. All the folks here working on ad-tech to polarize the good people of this country so they can squeeze another penny out of them. Then they have the gals to complain about people becoming radicalized. "Oh gee how did that happennnn" They got polarized on Facebook. Because you wanted them to. Because it keeps them coming back and your stock goes up. If you're a Facebook employee - congrats! This is what you've created. A radicalized cesspool of idiots to increase your bottom line.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
    Google isn't helping anymore than Facebook. Apple is dipping their toes into privacy focused features that hurt Facebook and Amazon but I suspect they're making a long adtech play.
DenisM 6y ago
Both parties are advancing the neoliberal economic consensus - the free enterprise and the free trade. The divisions between the two parties only serve to drive a wedge between the blue-collar working class on one hand and the white-collar/service working class on the other. The Free Trade generated enormous riches for the country over the last 50 years, but the worker incomes stayed flat. Both voting groups have the same economic interest in a different distribution of the spoils of the free trade, and it's only the political antagonism that prevents their collaboration.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  There's a growing cohort of people who understand this and have been actively fighting against it for decades. I fully expect this issue to come to a head within my lifetime. Hopefully it's solved by policy and not bloodshed but I won't hold my breath on that after seeing the brutal response to this summers peaceful protests.
  - DenisM 6y ago
    Do you think the summer protest were a move for or against the neoliberal consensus?
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
      Yes, absolutely. The voices against neoliberalism have grown in number and volume since 2019. Do you not?
      - DenisM 6y ago
        I think the summer protests have displaced the movement against the neoliberal doctrine rather than aiding the movement.
        TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
        I agree. The complete focus on all the politicians and media is on race and gender issues, completely ignoring economic issues.
ausjke 6y ago
after the election I cut the ties with all long-term friends who holds a different political view, none of us can bear with another sides so let's get rid of each other. I feel so much relieved actually and never looked back, in fact I should have done this long time ago. There is no way to get along, YOLO, no need to bend just for the fake of outdated nothing-in-common 'friendship' anymore. for those who are not even old friends and on the other side of the wall, I hope we live in different countries and never see each other ever on the street. I never felt that disappointed in the so called democracy, for a 50:50 split in this country, something must be changed or it will tie both sides deadly, nothing can be done then. Maybe a war is indeed the way out.
- mythrwy 6y ago
  That's just nuts and it doesn't need to be that way. Your politics is not your identity. Other people's politics are not their identity. It's just differences in policy opinions which can and do change through life or as circumstances change. If a person is intrinsically welded to political affinity as _the_ defining characteristic of themselves or others it's a huge problem. A huge imbalance. A horrible and shallow misunderstanding of the nature of the human experience. Most people want the same things out life and for society, they just have different ideas on the best policies to achieve this. Very few people are intrinsically and irredeemably evil. Many more are simply confused or misguided. Sometimes it's us that's misguided. Its useful to keep somewhat of an open mind and understand people view the world in different ways. Your friends are people and your friends not Democrats and Republicans.
  - minikites 6y ago
    "Politics" is how someone would treat you if they didn't know you.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
> We also found that Democrats and Republicans who held more inaccurate beliefs about the other side were even willing to subvert norms of democracy to hurt their political opponents. This is the scariest bit neither side seems to realize. You think the opposition is doing a terrible thing, so you have to do a bad thing for the greater good to counter it instead of doing the good thing. Now your opponents see you do the bad thing and imagine it as an even worse thing that they need to do bad things to counter, for the greater good. Who cares about breaking social norms when the opposition has already broken them even worse (or so you believe)? It's a positive feedback race to the bottom, with rational actions based on inaccurate beliefs every step of the way. Sure, I don't like my candidate, but they're the only way to stop the opposition's candidate, who has literal skeletons in their closet!
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
I would love to see an extension of this study that includes an in-group versions of these meta-beliefs. I want to know how extreme democrats think democrats tend to be and how extreme republicans think republicans tend to be. Personally, I'm pretty far left if I look at a right-wing community online, but pretty central if I look at a left-wing community online. I'd bet lots of people feel this way.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  As an extreme lefty (repeal IP/piracy laws, legalize all drugs, safe injection sites/free for addicts, green new deal, free necessities for homeless/disabled, free college, cancel student debt, reduce maximum interest rate to on consumers to 10%Apr, AI/automation tax, steep wealth taxes up to 99% over $1B, internet/telephones are necessities, free contraceptives everywhere, 3rd trimester abortions, livable wage, punitive laws against financial criminals (put executives in prison for life for 2008), enhanced worker rights, single payer health care, etc). I think AOC and Bernie are a hairs breadth left of center trying to get their constituents what they need to survive in this boring bcapitalist dystopia. I think trump and mtg are white supremacist terrorists stoking up a hot race war. Does that help?
cudgy 6y ago
The division is not the problem. How we handle the division is what matters. Cordial discourse and respect for individuals and their opinions is tantamount. Without it, there is little foundation to build compromise.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  That being said, tolerating hate is the same as espousing it oneself.
  - cudgy 6y ago
    Not sure we have the same definition of the simplistic buzzword “hate”. Should it be against the law to hate (intensely dislike) someone? Seems like a basic human right to me. If you mean hate to mean discriminate against someone based on their race or murder/assault them regardless of racist motives, then I agree. However, those are illegal acts punishable by law and not allowed in society. The flagrantly inaccurate usage of common words and/or attempts to change or expand their meaning (given there are pre-existing words in language) is making it more difficult to communicate and is usually a sign of a weak argument.
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
      Ignoring the scope creep from your comment, what is your definition of hate?
pgcj_poster 6y ago
How well do people do on estimates like this compared to estimates about other subjects? Because it kind of seems like a lot of the respondents are just plain innumerate. For instance, on the open borders question, the plurality of both party respondents answered that members of the opposing party had the most extreme possible view. That's obviously not going to be true on average for anything resembling a normal distribution no matter how polarized you think the parties are. Also, I bet respondents were confused about the meaning of "open borders." I've encountered people who somehow think that current (or pre 2016) US immigration policies qualify as "open borders" which would make the estimate that most democrats support "open borders" much closer to accurate.
arduanika 6y ago
Article: the divide is smaller than we think. Comments: heck no, watch how divided we are!
simonh 6y ago
It's important to realise that the last few Republican presidential candidates before Trump were McCain and Romney, hardly hard line extremists. Trump was a grass roots insurgent and until he actual won the candidacy almost the entire body of elected Republican representatives loathed him. The current situation is an extreme outlier. The Republican party is perfectly capable of socially progressive policies. After all Obamacare was basically their idea. Conversely the Dems are hardly throwing open the borders to everyone. Illegal immigration from Mexico under Obama almost halved, yes due to fence building he didn't start but the point is he didn't lift a finger to obstruct it. No Child Left Behind was bipartisan, but started under and was promoted by Bush. The militarising of the police was arguably started by Biden. Honestly, a lot of people like me outside the US have a hard time telling them apart when it comes to actual outcomes.
sleepysysadmin 6y ago
I'm not in the USA but I tell you, the political divide is larger today than I have ever seen it. This article looks at 1 thing? Not convincing at all. There is a quote that's really interesting. >Ideological division has been fused with an “us versus them” sectarianism that feels reminiscent of divisiveness and vitriol more commonly seen in war-torn countries than in healthy democracies. The USA has been at war for over 20 years in Afghanistan. Longer than the vietnam war. Lets not forget Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. The USA sure does seem to be surrounding Saudi Arabia and Iran. Then you have Blinken who has been secretary of state for a week or 2 making claims that Iran is "weeks away from a nuclear bomb". Amazing he gets the job and suddenly they are weeks away. Biden's government has started seizing numerous oil tankers asserting they are Iranian under false flag. The Saudileaks clearly indicate the Saudis are targeting Iran as well. The USA is exhausted from war and it sure does look like Biden will be declaring war in Iran. Ahmadinejad won't survive 2021. The world will forget that Iran's supreme leader Khamenei has issued a fatwa against the nuclear program. There's absolutely no nuclear bomb in Iran. Obama and John Kerry did a great job doing that. Yet here we are being lied to by the bidens new secretary of state saying they are weeks away from a nuclear bomb. No, this is the USA posturing for a reason to invade Iran.
biolurker1 6y ago
This can't be written after four years of Trump right? How is this even upvoted

79 points by undefined1 6y ago

lebrad 6y ago

In 2000, Ralph Nader supporters called this idea "the two-headed uniparty"

Daho0n 6y ago
I hadn't head that before. How very fitting.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Coming out of the hangover of the last 4 years, I'm starting to see clearly now how both parties work to keep people in petty conflict and intense infighting. It allows the power players to get away with so much. The MSM has 24-hour coverage of inane and petty things. Our politicians take turns with their heads in the trough and enrich themselves in the open. I don't want to leave my children a legacy of endless war and endless poverty.

harimau777 6y ago

The problem with articles like this is that what matters is how people vote not what they say their policy preferences are.

munk-a 6y ago
But people don't have freedom to vote as they'd like. Voting in a two party system is reduced to a "which is worse" question. If you're fiscally and socially liberal but feel very strongly about preventing abortion you might end up holding your nose while voting for the R candidate.
- mullingitover 6y ago
  > If you're fiscally and socially liberal but feel very strongly about preventing abortion you might end up holding your nose while voting for the R candidate. Not to get into a flamewar or anything, but if you're trying to prevent abortion then voting for the R candidate isn't a sensible choice. Hand in hand with wishing to ban abortion, they generally are hostile to the very policies (free birth control, such as IUD, on demand) that are the most effective in preventing abortion. Colorado cut teen birth rate and teen abortion rate in half simply by offering free IUDs[1]. The thing with the two party system is that the real choice for voters happens in the primaries. This is the chance to swing the party in a different direction, since in the general election people will typically hold their nose and vote a straight ticket even if they don't like all the positions their candidate holds. [1] https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/PSD_TitleX3_CFPI-Report.pdf https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/PSD_Tit...
  - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
    Unfortunately there is a non-negligible percentage of those who would follow the parent comment's suggestion due to religious affiliation. Some of those would also clutch pearls when mentioning birth control, out of prolonged exposure to FUD on the topic, i.e. "think of the children!"
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
      Or they might be billionaires and are worried that if the birth rate continues dropping they might have to modernize their facilities or pay higher wages.
      - munk-a 6y ago
        I can believe some billionaires having this opinion (since some aren't super sharp) but it's total BS. There are plenty of humans on earth - there isn't any shortage of labour out there. People over-reproducing is a strain on society. I'm not saying we should limit how many children folks can have, but there isn't any societal upside to 14 person families.
witherk 6y ago
Great point. Measuring the divide between parties by the issue positions their voters misses the more important things like "would you rather your party try to hold onto power or admit defeat" after an election.
dragonwriter 6y ago
No, the problem with articles like this is that they make claims about differences in people's policy preferences without actually measuring policy preferences, just on a 1-100 scale how extreme they feel their own preferences and others are. Without objective touchstones for what 25, 50, and 75 mean on the scales between the extreme polar positions that are given as the end points, where people rate themselves numerically isn't likely to have any coherent relation to actual policy positions at all.

monocasa 6y ago

Particularly ever since the New Democrats took over the party. Their whole shtick was injecting a bunch of right wing policies into the Democratic Party, under the idea that voters had shifted to the right and the only way to win was to follow them. Clinton made good on his promise to "end the welfare system as we know it". Obamacare was an unashamed rewrite of Newt Gingich and The Heritage Foundation's 1993/1994 HEART Act, all the way to the individual mandate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Democrats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Democrats IMO a lot of the both party's issues right now stem from the fact that Democrats have moved so far to the right that only the far right positions differentiate a Republican from a mainline Democrat opponent.

minikites 6y ago
I think this is a great analysis. One factor I would add to both your comment and about the political divide in general is earmarks. Eliminating earmarks (political "pork" in bills) seems like a great way to eliminate wasteful spending. Except now we're in a situation where many of our representatives and senators can't point to a new bridge and say "I'm the reason we have that, now re-elect me" so they move to culture war issues as a way to fire up the base. This effect, combined with gerrymandering for House seats, means that the only thing many politicians have to fear is a primary fight. In an effort to avoid primary challengers, the Democrats and Republicans both ran to the right, leaving us where we are now: Biden, a Republican by 1960s standards, is painted as a "radical socialist" against all evidence, because it turns out the base, because there's literally nothing else for politicians to offer to their constituents. I've heard rumblings that earmarks might be coming back and I really hope they do.
adventured 6y ago
The Republicans have moved very far to the left over the past 30-40 years, from where they used to be. Topics no longer up for serious discussion in the Republican Party that used to be very common: Doing away with Social Security / replacing SS. Getting rid of Medicare and Medicaid, replacing them with entirely private systems. The gold standard, going back to it. Cutting spending (actually attempting to do it, not just paying rare lip service to it). Getting more aggressive with the war on drugs. Increasing punishment for crime, putting people into prison for longer sentences. It was George W Bush's administration that implemented the successful Housing First program for homelessness assistance, which would have been considered an exceptionally bad welfare state program by the 1980s Republicans. Back then it would have been considered to encourage homelessness, they would have said it entrenches it. Today's Republicans support rampant welfare give-aways in the form of stimulus checks. That would have been considered a crazy Socialist program universally by Republicans just as recently as the early 1990s. Giving people checks during a recession was unthinkable by Republicans as recently as 20 years ago (eg the 2001-2002 recession). Trump - with wide Republican support - just implemented the best criminal justice reform in US history. That would have gotten near zero Republican support in the 1980s. The Republicans in Reagan's time were very militantly against gay marriage, and any form of sexuality being shown anywhere at any time. In the early 1990s Murphy Brown - a fictional TV character - deciding to raise a child on her own was a very controversial matter among Republicans, so much so that Dan Quayle made it a prominent issue. Republicans just 30 years ago were radically more conservative than they are today and that's putting it mildly. Those same Reagan era Republicans were almost universally - with very few exceptions - strongly in favor of the war on drugs. Every other word out of their mouths was about how to further criminalize drugs. Today the exact opposite is true, very few Republicans are in favor of the war on drugs. Trump just came and went and the Republicans barely lifted an eyebrow at trying to roll back the positive momentum of drug liberalization. If people on the left think Republicans today are far right, well, ha. They don't remember what Republicans were like back then apparently. Today's average Republican is a centrist Democrat circa the mid 1980s and early 1990s.

eyelidlessness 6y ago

This would be great news if everyone were invested in minimizing polarization and detoxing the political conflicts that we’re facing. But that’s not the case. The biggest divide between the “parties” (which isn’t political in nature and has nothing to do with the very real and significant differences between the parties) is that one sees polarization as a tool and the other doesn’t acknowledge that. On Twitter, this has been exceedingly shorthanded into “tan suit”. One party is so invested in conflict that they invent it by manufacturing a scandal out of a fashion choice. The other is so invested in conflict avoidance that it pathologically refuses to hold the first accountable for anything meaningful. In other words the divide isn’t political, it’s about ambition and shrewdness. This won’t be overcome by finding common ground. Edit: added a comma because it would’ve driven me nuts not to. Also to add a reasonable disclaimer that I’m not philosophically a member of either party, but I caucus/coalition with the one I obviously perceive to not be fundamentally bellicose. Edit 2: well since it needed clarification, I consider the Republican Party to be the bellicose one and the Democratic Party to be the spineless one.

witherk 6y ago
Interesting, what are some things that you think democrats could do to hold republicans accountable?
- munk-a 6y ago
  I think Dems have an uphill battle to fight - media seems strongly slanted against liberal policies as evidenced by the lack of deficit spending being anywhere in the debate when tax cuts were happening compared to deficit spending to address the viral crisis. There are entrenched interests that will put a lot of messaging toward suppressing discussions of liberal policies.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    > media seems strongly slanted against liberal policies Um... what? If you think media is strongly slanted against liberal policies, look at how it treats conservative policies.

jdavis703 6y ago

While using a scale to measure divide on particular issues such as open vs closed borders is interesting, the part about “disliking” opposing partisans seems to be an inappropriate way to measure political distance. For example a Black Democrat voter probably thinks Republican voters don’t like her because she’s Black, not because she’s a Democrat. Regardless this shows there’s room for compromise on certain hard policy issues, but soft issues (i.e. the culture wars) requires more nuanced study.

Daho0n 6y ago

For the life of me I cannot see why this article is written in a positive light. The result is pretty clear: Members of the two parties hate each other less in reality than they think they do and they are actually closer than they think. "Hey you know what? The two only real options we have in an election doesn't actually disagree as much as you'd think!" How is that a good thing? With only two options they better be far apart or those left-leaning on the right and those that are right-leaning on the left starts to blend together and you have one party in reality with two names and two outer wings that hate each others guts. At least as one party they might work better together (hah, okay sorry that was stupid).

livueta 6y ago
Yeah, an interesting implication of a lack of substantive policy differences is that policy-heavy partisans on either side are going to be disappointed - the necessities of tribalism generate a lot of noise and rage around controversial issues, but when it comes down to actual policy there's no appetite. I saw an interesting example of this first-hand last year. I live in a pretty bougie area, kind of place where everyone's car radio (and everyone owns a car) is pegged to the local NPR station. BLM signs went up like mushrooms - sure, neat. Then, the local school levy election rolls around. Most of the same properties grow "Vote Yes For Kids!" signs. We even get "vote yes" mailers explaining that since the state only funds "basic education", we've got to top up our local schools to do right by our kids. Of course, any discussion of how areas without fat property tax revenues get by is conspicuously absent. There is not a lot of appreciation of the irony of holding these positions simultaneously. Words (and yard signs, I guess) are cheap but policy might actually impact upper-middle-class WASP QoL; can't be having that.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

I think a common reason behind this (and I've find myself doing this) is that when the most extreme elements of your preferred party do something crazy and outlandish, you have a tendency to push it aside and think "that's only the fringe of my party", but when you see it on the other side, you think "Anyone who could even think of being on the same side as those nutjobs is evil." That is, most folks have a tendency to personify themselves with the middle of their party, but personify those in the other party as the extreme of that party.

neartheplain 6y ago
“Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions.” https://time.com/4403510/george-w-bush-speech-dallas-shooting-memorial-service/ https://time.com/4403510/george-w-bush-speech-dallas-shootin...
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  "Ultimate attribution error is the tendency to internally attribute negative outgroup and positive ingroup behaviour and to externally attribute positive outgroup and negative ingroup behaviour. So in other words, ultimate attribution error arises as a way to explain an outgroup's negative behaviour as flaws in their personality, and to explain an outgroup's positive behaviour as a result of chance or circumstance." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error
minikites 6y ago
I don't disagree with this in abstract but I think the idea that both sides have extreme elements that are in any way comparable died on January 6th. There's a difference between Bernie Sanders and Marjorie Taylor Greene, but a lot of people don't see it that way because they're uncomfortable being in the same group as Marjorie Taylor Greene. I think the Republicans have a responsibility to address this and I don't think the Democrats are in a similarly dire situation.
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EEMac 6y ago

This frustrates a LOT of people who want more political difference expressed than the two parties exhibit.

Daho0n 6y ago

I wish we had a tool, like the political compass, that those who run for (re-)election had to fill out by law before they could run. As it is now no one have any idea where different candidates are on the political spectrum as all they do is talk in soundbites and repeat their slogans over and over again.

_underfl0w_ 6y ago
Unfortunately this would effectively pin down a candidate to their word and past promises they may have made - most politicians seem to avoid doing that when possible ;)

orthecreedence 6y ago

It's a perceived difference between two wings of the "capitalist imperialist" party stoked by media outlets following the money by realizing that people click more when they're outraged. No, both parties are not the same if you're a centrist, but from the far left side of things, you definitely need your spectacles on to see the difference. Granted, one faction tends to be on the right side of history/civil rights a lot more. If we're interested in real reconciliation within the current system, I'd definitely advocate for state and nation-wide voter reform. Some sort of proportional representation voting protocol would allow people to pick representatives that argue on behalf of maybe 50-80% of their beliefs, rather than 10-20% of their beliefs. I know that when "my person" wins, I never feel like they're going to particularly represent me or the people I care about in any impactful way. I think the perception that there are only two real choices stokes the divide quite a bit, because being either with us or against us is a lot easier when there are only two teams. Breaking up the two party system with voter reform would be my #1 fix. That, and reversing Citizens United.

vmception 6y ago

great graphs for that example I've found the same thing because I neither deflect talking points, nor do I immediately block people that don't match my talking point and then I make the cardinal sin of saying "both sides are doing this" and that simply makes both sides dehumanize me when its fairly clear they haven't really talked to each other in a while to come up with an accurate rebuttal depolarize yourself kthx

titzer 6y ago

The divide is not going to be fixed without disrupting the connection between outrage and political donations. Until that is addressed there is massive financial incentive in making people as angry as possible and it will continue to get worse.

azinman2 6y ago

"Second, we can engage with leaders and the media who may be exacerbating Americans’ misperceptions of each other." Can we? Right now the fundamental model of media AND political parties is fueled by hyper-partisanship, outrage, us-vs-them, and how all of these things combine to solicit eyeballs and keep them on us and not them. Sean Hannity or one of the other talking heads at Fox (can't remember which) literally has or at least had a nightly segment on how all other media is lying to you or not covering what Fox covers, and thus they're bad so stick with us. It's like a meta-advertisement couched as opinionews. These things _work_ to accomplish the goals (eyeballs on us), even if they're destroying the country in the process. So how is a conversation going to change any of that?

Tycho 6y ago

I'd expect them to be close. In a two party system, the parties will coalesce around similar policies. The electorate will always have variance along the first principal component (which probably corresponds to community prosperity vs individual comfort), and the parties will project in opposite directions, but nevertheless staying close to the centre.

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dragonwriter 6y ago

Trying to assess actual policy disagreements by putting the polar extremes at 0 and 100 and having people pick a number in between for their actual policy preference without any concrete touchpoints for what those intermediary value means doesn't work. Your aren't comparing Republicans and Democrats policy positions, you are comparing Republicans and Democrats views of the relative extremism of their own policy positions and those of the other parties. A valid summary is not that the actual differences in policy preferences are smaller than expected, but that members of each party see their own positions as less extreme and the other parties positions as more extreme than members of the other party do. Which is very much not news, and doesn't actually indicate anyone is overestimating real policy divides as the authors claim. Their methodology could not, even remotely, support the basic claims they are making.

jleyank 6y ago

This is not an appropriate article or discussion for HN. There's lots of other places to "be political". Not so many to "be technical"... It would be a great disappointment to see HN turn into, say, Slashdot.

bitstan 6y ago
It's a great article for HN. All the folks here working on ad-tech to polarize the good people of this country so they can squeeze another penny out of them. Then they have the gals to complain about people becoming radicalized. "Oh gee how did that happennnn" They got polarized on Facebook. Because you wanted them to. Because it keeps them coming back and your stock goes up. If you're a Facebook employee - congrats! This is what you've created. A radicalized cesspool of idiots to increase your bottom line.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  Google isn't helping anymore than Facebook. Apple is dipping their toes into privacy focused features that hurt Facebook and Amazon but I suspect they're making a long adtech play.

DenisM 6y ago

Both parties are advancing the neoliberal economic consensus - the free enterprise and the free trade. The divisions between the two parties only serve to drive a wedge between the blue-collar working class on one hand and the white-collar/service working class on the other. The Free Trade generated enormous riches for the country over the last 50 years, but the worker incomes stayed flat. Both voting groups have the same economic interest in a different distribution of the spoils of the free trade, and it's only the political antagonism that prevents their collaboration.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
There's a growing cohort of people who understand this and have been actively fighting against it for decades. I fully expect this issue to come to a head within my lifetime. Hopefully it's solved by policy and not bloodshed but I won't hold my breath on that after seeing the brutal response to this summers peaceful protests.
- DenisM 6y ago
  Do you think the summer protest were a move for or against the neoliberal consensus?
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
    Yes, absolutely. The voices against neoliberalism have grown in number and volume since 2019. Do you not?
    - DenisM 6y ago
      I think the summer protests have displaced the movement against the neoliberal doctrine rather than aiding the movement.
      - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
        I agree. The complete focus on all the politicians and media is on race and gender issues, completely ignoring economic issues.

ausjke 6y ago

after the election I cut the ties with all long-term friends who holds a different political view, none of us can bear with another sides so let's get rid of each other. I feel so much relieved actually and never looked back, in fact I should have done this long time ago. There is no way to get along, YOLO, no need to bend just for the fake of outdated nothing-in-common 'friendship' anymore. for those who are not even old friends and on the other side of the wall, I hope we live in different countries and never see each other ever on the street. I never felt that disappointed in the so called democracy, for a 50:50 split in this country, something must be changed or it will tie both sides deadly, nothing can be done then. Maybe a war is indeed the way out.

mythrwy 6y ago
That's just nuts and it doesn't need to be that way. Your politics is not your identity. Other people's politics are not their identity. It's just differences in policy opinions which can and do change through life or as circumstances change. If a person is intrinsically welded to political affinity as _the_ defining characteristic of themselves or others it's a huge problem. A huge imbalance. A horrible and shallow misunderstanding of the nature of the human experience. Most people want the same things out life and for society, they just have different ideas on the best policies to achieve this. Very few people are intrinsically and irredeemably evil. Many more are simply confused or misguided. Sometimes it's us that's misguided. Its useful to keep somewhat of an open mind and understand people view the world in different ways. Your friends are people and your friends not Democrats and Republicans.
- minikites 6y ago
  "Politics" is how someone would treat you if they didn't know you.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

> We also found that Democrats and Republicans who held more inaccurate beliefs about the other side were even willing to subvert norms of democracy to hurt their political opponents. This is the scariest bit neither side seems to realize. You think the opposition is doing a terrible thing, so you have to do a bad thing for the greater good to counter it instead of doing the good thing. Now your opponents see you do the bad thing and imagine it as an even worse thing that they need to do bad things to counter, for the greater good. Who cares about breaking social norms when the opposition has already broken them even worse (or so you believe)? It's a positive feedback race to the bottom, with rational actions based on inaccurate beliefs every step of the way. Sure, I don't like my candidate, but they're the only way to stop the opposition's candidate, who has literal skeletons in their closet!

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

I would love to see an extension of this study that includes an in-group versions of these meta-beliefs. I want to know how extreme democrats think democrats tend to be and how extreme republicans think republicans tend to be. Personally, I'm pretty far left if I look at a right-wing community online, but pretty central if I look at a left-wing community online. I'd bet lots of people feel this way.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
As an extreme lefty (repeal IP/piracy laws, legalize all drugs, safe injection sites/free for addicts, green new deal, free necessities for homeless/disabled, free college, cancel student debt, reduce maximum interest rate to on consumers to 10%Apr, AI/automation tax, steep wealth taxes up to 99% over $1B, internet/telephones are necessities, free contraceptives everywhere, 3rd trimester abortions, livable wage, punitive laws against financial criminals (put executives in prison for life for 2008), enhanced worker rights, single payer health care, etc). I think AOC and Bernie are a hairs breadth left of center trying to get their constituents what they need to survive in this boring bcapitalist dystopia. I think trump and mtg are white supremacist terrorists stoking up a hot race war. Does that help?

cudgy 6y ago

The division is not the problem. How we handle the division is what matters. Cordial discourse and respect for individuals and their opinions is tantamount. Without it, there is little foundation to build compromise.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
That being said, tolerating hate is the same as espousing it oneself.
- cudgy 6y ago
  Not sure we have the same definition of the simplistic buzzword “hate”. Should it be against the law to hate (intensely dislike) someone? Seems like a basic human right to me. If you mean hate to mean discriminate against someone based on their race or murder/assault them regardless of racist motives, then I agree. However, those are illegal acts punishable by law and not allowed in society. The flagrantly inaccurate usage of common words and/or attempts to change or expand their meaning (given there are pre-existing words in language) is making it more difficult to communicate and is usually a sign of a weak argument.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
    Ignoring the scope creep from your comment, what is your definition of hate?

pgcj_poster 6y ago

How well do people do on estimates like this compared to estimates about other subjects? Because it kind of seems like a lot of the respondents are just plain innumerate. For instance, on the open borders question, the plurality of both party respondents answered that members of the opposing party had the most extreme possible view. That's obviously not going to be true on average for anything resembling a normal distribution no matter how polarized you think the parties are. Also, I bet respondents were confused about the meaning of "open borders." I've encountered people who somehow think that current (or pre 2016) US immigration policies qualify as "open borders" which would make the estimate that most democrats support "open borders" much closer to accurate.

arduanika 6y ago

Article: the divide is smaller than we think. Comments: heck no, watch how divided we are!

simonh 6y ago

It's important to realise that the last few Republican presidential candidates before Trump were McCain and Romney, hardly hard line extremists. Trump was a grass roots insurgent and until he actual won the candidacy almost the entire body of elected Republican representatives loathed him. The current situation is an extreme outlier. The Republican party is perfectly capable of socially progressive policies. After all Obamacare was basically their idea. Conversely the Dems are hardly throwing open the borders to everyone. Illegal immigration from Mexico under Obama almost halved, yes due to fence building he didn't start but the point is he didn't lift a finger to obstruct it. No Child Left Behind was bipartisan, but started under and was promoted by Bush. The militarising of the police was arguably started by Biden. Honestly, a lot of people like me outside the US have a hard time telling them apart when it comes to actual outcomes.

sleepysysadmin 6y ago

I'm not in the USA but I tell you, the political divide is larger today than I have ever seen it. This article looks at 1 thing? Not convincing at all. There is a quote that's really interesting. >Ideological division has been fused with an “us versus them” sectarianism that feels reminiscent of divisiveness and vitriol more commonly seen in war-torn countries than in healthy democracies. The USA has been at war for over 20 years in Afghanistan. Longer than the vietnam war. Lets not forget Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. The USA sure does seem to be surrounding Saudi Arabia and Iran. Then you have Blinken who has been secretary of state for a week or 2 making claims that Iran is "weeks away from a nuclear bomb". Amazing he gets the job and suddenly they are weeks away. Biden's government has started seizing numerous oil tankers asserting they are Iranian under false flag. The Saudileaks clearly indicate the Saudis are targeting Iran as well. The USA is exhausted from war and it sure does look like Biden will be declaring war in Iran. Ahmadinejad won't survive 2021. The world will forget that Iran's supreme leader Khamenei has issued a fatwa against the nuclear program. There's absolutely no nuclear bomb in Iran. Obama and John Kerry did a great job doing that. Yet here we are being lied to by the bidens new secretary of state saying they are weeks away from a nuclear bomb. No, this is the USA posturing for a reason to invade Iran.

biolurker1 6y ago

This can't be written after four years of Trump right? How is this even upvoted