WASHINGTON — It isn’t just that Democrats and Republicans agree on less and less these days. It’s that they hate each other’s guts. In Congress and in statehouses across the U.S., differences of opinion are widening when it comes to taxation, social issues and more. Beyond specific disagreement about a particular bill or budget, though, negotiation has become trickier as legislators seek compromises with people whom their constituents simply detest.
Ordinary Americans increasingly view members of the opposite party with contempt and scorn. They see them as less intelligent and more selfish, according to pollsters and political scientists. And a parent is more likely to say she wouldn’t even want someone in the other party to marry her child.
America dodged a catastrophe last week as Congress voted to extend the national borrowing limit for two more years — just another day on the job for our increasingly divided lawmakers. The next crisis isn’t far off, though. In a governmental system of checks and balances, just keeping the lights on requires cooperation from everyone, warns Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University.
American politics has entered a “fundamentally different era,” he says.
Abramowitz is one among several scholars who have been trying to solve a puzzle in polarization. Americans are becoming more likely to vote consistently for one party or the other, but for some reason, they aren’t more likely to describe themselves as committed partisans.
The apparent solution is that even though voters aren’t any more dedicated to their own parties, they have a newfound antipathy for the other party, and they are less willing to consider casting a ballot for one of the other party’s candidates.
The average voter’s feelings about her own party haven’t changed much over the past few decades, according to the American National Election Studies, a recurring survey. Respondents are asked to rate their own party and the opposing party out of 100 points, with larger numbers indicating more positive feelings. They have consistently given their own party a rating of between 70 and 80.
Meanwhile, though, that average voter’s views of the other party have become more negative, according to the surveys. And more voters said they felt anger and fear toward the other party’s presidential candidate in the 2012 election than in any previous survey. Roughly two thirds of voters said the other party’s candidate made them angry, and nearly half felt afraid.
That distaste extends beyond candidates in the other party to their supporters, according to various surveys compiled by Stanford University political scientist Shanto Iyengar and his colleagues.
In 1960, for example, surveyors asked Americans to rate members of their own party and of the other party for intelligence and selfishness. Respondents saw members of their own party as slightly more intelligent, by about 6 percent of the points on the scale, and somewhat less selfish, by about 17 percent of the available points. Those differences expanded to 48 percent and 43 percent, respectively, in another survey in 2008.
Americans have also become less likely to see members of the other party as a suitable daughter- or son-in-law. Back in 1960, only about 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats told pollsters they would be “displeased” if their child married someone from the opposite political party. By 2012, 49 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Democrats said they would be at least “somewhat unhappy.”
Americans’ views of the major parties have changed at least in part because the parties themselves have changed. For one thing, it used to be that you couldn’t always tell much about a person’s political views based on his party, because there were both liberal and conservative voters in each party. Today, by contrast, party is a reliable index of political inclination.
If you really dislike people with liberal opinions, it makes sense to denigrate Democrats as a group now, whereas before, there might have been enough conservative Democrats to redeem the party from your point of view.
