SCC politics are drifting Left—and Right

Unsubstantiated accusations, belligerent Trumpian campaign tactics, turning a blind eye to actual concerns. To sum up the last election cycle with “polarized” feels like an understatement — and, for San Joseans, nothing new. Dan Walters in CalMatters unpacks the recent phenomenon of increasing extremism in both Parties: While the Left and Right aggressively plow further in their respective directions, a common-sense, collaborative middle ground has dwindled.

Boris Shor of the University of Houston and Nolan McCarty of Princeton University assembled a massive bank of legislative voting records and other data to chart the growth of state-level polarization.

They discovered that the once-significant ideological “overlap” between legislators of the two parties – the point at which there could be bipartisan cooperation – had vanished in the last quarter-century. Democrats moved to the left, Republicans moved to the right and dominance by one party, such as what happened in California, increased.

“States in the West are both the most polarized and are polarizing the fastest,” the researchers write. “The South began as the least polarized region, but has been polarizing fairly quickly and overtook the Northeast in 2007, which is the region with the lowest growth.”

“As with the US Congress, all 99 state legislative chambers are polarized, that is, with party medians significantly different from each other,” they continue. “In 88 of those 99 chambers, the parties are getting even more significantly distant from each other over time.”

California, not surprisingly, is a leader in what is not a positive trend.

“The five most polarized states in the country in 2020 are, in order, Colorado, California, Arizona, Texas, and Washington State,” the study found. “While California was for a long time the most polarized state, it was overtaken by Colorado in 2017.”

This article originally appeared in CalMatters. Read the whole thing here.

Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity

Image by Marco Verch