Trending Now
We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
{{ subpage.title }}
Protestors shout at counterprotesters at the Women’s March at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., USA, on November 2, 2024.
Q+A: No, America is not as polarized as you think.
– By Alex Kliment
It’s become commonplace in recent years to say that America is deeply polarized. That we are a country of people split into increasingly irreconcilable extremes of belief, ideology, and politics. That we are tearing ourselves apart.
But at least one prominent scholar of American politics has a slightly different view of this. Morris Fiorina is a political scientist at Stanford University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has written for years about American politics, focusing on public opinion, elections, and political representation.
At a moment when America feels more divided and on edge than at any point in decades, I called up Dr. Fiorina to ask him what he thought. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.
AK: Dr. Fiorina, in your work you have argued against the idea that Americans are hopelessly polarized – why?
Fiorina: Well, if we are more polarized, then you’d expect ordinary people today would be much more likely to say they're liberals or conservatives – and much less likely to say they’re moderates – than 50 years ago.
In fact, that/s not the case. “Moderate” has always been the preferred position, it’s still about 40% of the population, then as now. So there’s no evidence that the middle is actually giving way to the extremes.
What’s actually happened is that the political parties themselves have become more homogeneous and polarized in their positions. For example, when Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, only a quarter of Democrats said they were liberals. Today, it’s two- thirds. When Jerry Ford was the GOP candidate that year, 50% of Republicans said they were conservatives. Today, it’s three-quarters.
Today, everybody in each party has gone to the liberal or conservative position. So the days when you could have cross-party coalitions where liberal Republicans got together with conservative Democrats are gone. Those people are almost non-existent now.
AK: When you say “Republicans” and “Democrats,” do you mean elected officials? Registered voters? Activists?
Fiorina: Great question. There’s a big difference between normal people and the political class. The political class are the roughly 15% of the country who live and breathe politics. These are the people who give money, who work in campaigns, who post on Facebook and go on BlueSky and X and so forth. These are the people you basically avoid at cocktail parties.
And so when we’re talking about polarization, that’s primarily where it is now. Among the political class. It’s percolated down, simply because of party sorting. The average Democrat now has more differences with the average Republican than they did 50 years ago. But there too, when you ask people if they “like” Republicans or Democrats, they’re generally not thinking about their neighbor who has a Harris or a Trump bumper sticker. They’re thinking about the people they see on TV. The political class. If you really make it clear that you’re talking about ordinary Democrats and Republicans, the polarization is not nearly as strong.
AK: What accounts for this ideological sorting of the two parties?
Fiorina: One reason is demographic change. After the 1960s, the Southern Democrats and the Sun Belt basically became Republican and the Great Migration of African Americans northward shifted urban politics.
But a lot of it was also unpredictable. In 1960, I’d have guessed the Democrats would become the pro-life party—after all, they had the Catholics and the Southern Baptists. And I’d have guessed Republicans would be more focused on the environment—they were the party of Teddy Roosevelt, the National Parks system, and so on. But things didn’t go that way.
There’s also the nationalization of politics. It used to be that every big city had multiple papers and most small towns had papers too. That’s largely gone now. People don’t know as much about their local candidates. It’s mostly national coverage of national issues now.
And there’s the financing. When I was just starting out as an assistant professor, the average House campaign was much cheaper than today, yes, but also most of the money came from local people, friends, neighbors, and local interest groups.
Now it’s mostly national fundraising networks. GOP money from Texas goes into Republican races everywhere, Democratic money from Hollywood and Manhattan goes into Democratic races everywhere. All of that imposes a much more homogenous and divided national agenda on candidates and parties.
AK: I’m struck that you didn’t mention social media as a factor.
Fiorina: This all started well in advance of social media. This was going on for 30 years before Facebook. So there is a lot of exaggeration about social media, but studies show how few people actually pay any attention to politics on social media. Less than 1% of registered voters visit BlueSky daily, for example. But again, these are the visible people. These are the political class people we think of when we think of national politics. So social media is blamed for things by people who don’t have a sense of history, and they’re also probably people who are on social media a lot.
AK: We’re talking just a few days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which was the latest in a string of high profile acts of political violence affecting prominent figures of both parties. How does that trend fit in with your thinking about polarization?
Fiorina: Well, we have always been a violent society. We had 70 years of labor wars [in the late 19th and early 20th century] when hundreds of strikers were shot down by the National Guard, and even army troops. And in the sixties, violence of this kind was typical. Between my senior year of high school and my senior year of college, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X were all shot. One of the things that I think scares people today is they don’t remember these episodes which were much worse.
AK: If the problem is party polarization rather than popular polarization, what’s the cure?
Fiorina: I’ve been asked that question for 20 years and I don’t know. What worries me most is simply that we have this political gridlock and stalemate at a time when we face genuine problems – budgetary problems, ecological problems, international problems. And right now, our political system is simply incapable of coming together and doing something positive.
LOS ANGELES, CA - JANUARY 07: A wind-driven fire burns on January 7, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. Santa Ana wind is fueling wildfires in Los Angeles that have destroyed homes and forced the evacuation of thousands of people.
Politics inflamed amid California wildfires
As California’s most destructive wildfires continue to blaze across Los Angeles County, having killed 16 and displaced more than 166,000 residents, emergency response efforts have become politicized, both at home and abroad.
Actor James Woods, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and right-wing political commentators have accused Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley of prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives over firefighting essentials. In response, Crowley cited a $17.4 million budget reduction to the LAFD in 2025, affecting overtime staffing and essential programs. Los Angeles Fire Commission President Genethia Hudley-Hayes defended Crowley, arguing that the scale of the fires, high winds, and an empty reservoir that was under repair would have overwhelmed even a fully funded department. Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has called for an independent investigation into water supply failures.
While domestic politics is bitterly divided, on the international front the story is one of unity. Mexico and Canada have sent firefighting equipment, including water bombers and personnel, despite President-elect Donald Trump’s promises of punitive tariffs against both countries.
Will the goodwill effort change hearts and minds in the Trump administration? Alberta Premier Danielle Smith posted to X that “Good neighbours are always there for each other in times of need, and we will assist our American friends in any way they need during this crisis.” She later posted photos of herself meeting with Trump at Mar-A-Lago at the weekend, along with Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary.
Illustration shows several congressmen engaged in a brawl on the floor of the House of Representatives.
The end of polarization in America?
How does this all end? Does it? It’s a question a lot of Americans have been asking themselves in the week since an assassin’s bullet missed Donald Trump’s skull by less than a quarter of an inch.
It was, of course, the first time a gunman had put a US president (or former president) in his sights since the 1981 attempt on Ronald Reagan. Most Americans alive today have no memory of that moment.
In some ways, such a long reprieve between assassinations was unusual for the United States.
Despite what President Joe Biden said this week about this kind of violence having “no place” in American society, high-level political killings are deeply woven into US history. At least a quarter of all US presidents have been targeted for death, most of them in the 20th century alone. Four died.
But the atmosphere in America is vastly more polarized and divided than it was even when Reagan was shot, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.
To be clear, some degree of polarization by itself isn’t a bad thing. Disagreement is important. You don’t want a society where everyone believes the same thing privately, much less one in which people only feel comfortable saying the same thing publicly. That’s not a functional democracy – that’s North Korea.
The trouble, though, is what experts call “pernicious polarization.” That’s when political divisions harden into increasingly dissociated tribes, each of which views the other not as fellow citizens with different experiences and ideas, but as mortal enemies.
That’s the America we live in today. It’s an America where liberals and conservatives not only don’t trust each other, marry each other, or vote for each other – they barely even see or interact with each other. “Liberal” and “conservative” have gone from being political labels to tribal affiliations, and the tribes live on different islands.
How bad is it? A sweeping historical study of polarization by the Carnegie Endowment found that since 1950, no advanced democracy has suffered levels of polarization as high, or for as long, as what the US has experienced over the past 10 years.
And, soberingly, it also found that no liberal democracy around the world has been able to retreat from extreme polarization with its democracy intact.
It wasn’t always this way. Even during the 1960s and 1970s, when America was convulsed with political violence over civil rights, the Vietnam War, and counterculture, the two parties had a lot more ideological overlap. You could find Democrats who were pro-life and Republicans who were concerned about access to guns. (One of them was Reagan’s spokesman Jim Brady, who after being severely wounded in the 1981 shooting, dedicated his life to passing sensible gun control laws – the 1993 “Brady Bill” is named after him.)
This sort of thing is what political scientists call “crosscutting polarization” – i.e., divisions that slash through party divisions, preventing partisan groups from becoming warring teams. In short: We need more crosscutting again.
The trouble is that a lot of things work against that: geographical segregation along political lines; social media algorithms that reward extreme viewpoints; a decline of local media reporting on issues close to people’s lives; a two-party political system where districts are often heavily gerrymandered, forcing politicians to pander to the extremes rather than to build bridges.
Conflict is a more rational strategy than compromise in almost all areas of our politics even if it’s leading us all off a cliff into a very dark ravine.
Rising political violence is one result. Last year, for example, there were more than 8,000 threats of violence against federal lawmakers, a tenfold increase since 2016.
And as we slouch toward the most contentious and high-stakes election in America’s modern history, most people seem resigned to things getting worse. A poll taken just after the attempt on Trump’s life showed that two-thirds of Americans think the current environment makes political violence more likely.
Is there any hope? Yes, says Murat Somer, a political science professor at Ozyegin University in Istanbul, who co-authored the Carnegie report.
“You have to redefine politics in a way that cuts across those cultural divisions,” he says. One way to do that, he says, is to put the focus back on one of the underlying causes of polarization and lack of trust in institutions in the first place: the decline of social mobility.
“What people have in common across party lines,” he says, “is unhappiness about inequality.”
That’s a start. Other theorists see structural changes that could help. Lee Drutman, a scholar at the New America Foundation, and author of the book “The Two Party Doom Loop”, says tweaking the two-party system by introducing multi-member congressional districts with proportional representation would help to smudge the partisan lines in constructive ways again.
But most of all, it may require a change of mindset – to stop believing that every election is possibly the last one for the America we love (whichever one that may be.)
“It’s important not to think ‘well, if we lose this election it’s over,’” says Somer. “No, it’s not over. A new phase or a new period will start, but it’s not over. It’s very important not to give up after elections, because no president, from either party, can very rapidly or fundamentally transform the country.”
Drutman agrees. “Things may be a little ugly for a while,” he says, “but I do think that there are enough people who are engaged in the work of democratic renewal that we will get to the other side of this. I don't know what the cost of getting to the other side of this will be, but I do think eventually we’ll get to a better political environment.”
What do you think? Can we reduce polarization? Should we? What would you like to see happen? Write us here. If you include your name and location, we may run your response in an upcoming edition of the GZERO Daily Newsletter.