That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [137]
Source: National Atlas of the United States®
What this means is that in “safe” districts the crucial election is the primary, in which registered Democrats or Republicans select the party’s candidate. Once you win the primary in a district gerrymandered to your party’s advantage, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, you are virtually guaranteed to win the general election. Because the voters in primaries generally must be registered members of the party, and because the ones who vote in primaries tend to be the most ideologically committed members of the party, candidates nearer the extremes of the political spectrum tend to do better in primaries than those positioned closer to the center. After winning the primary, the extreme candidate is then in a position to get the votes of more moderate voters in the general election—because in effect the only other choice is the extreme candidate from the other party. Moreover, once elected, the official knows that the only politician who can knock him or her out of office is not a candidate from the other party, whose chances have been reduced almost to zero by gerrymandering, but a more extreme candidate within his or her own party, who can pose a challenge in the next primary. The desire avoid a primary challenge discourages moderation and compromise with the other party while the representative is in office.
In this way, moderate voters elect extreme candidates: The political system does not offer them moderate choices. It works so that, as former senator Evan Bayh, a centrist Democrat who represented a relatively conservative state, Indiana, told us, “It’s the people in the middle—the moderates, the independents—who get turned off and drop out, which only accentuates the power of the two extremes.”
A Broken System
The geographically grotesque, politically uncompetitive electoral districts that gerrymandering can produce are the result of the political machinations of Democrats and Republicans working in state legislatures around the country. But the polarization of the American political system—seen, above all, in the great sorting out of the two parties so that liberals are concentrated in the Democratic Party and conservatives in the Republican Party—is also the product of broad and deep social, economic, and technological forces that have shaped American society for half a century and more.
Nor is a deep division between the two major parties an altogether novel development in American history. American politics have been polarized in several eras prior to this one, but the previous occasions do not offer useful precedents for dealing effectively with the nation’s major challenges.
In the early years of the republic, the Federalists and anti-Federalists stood at least as far apart from each other politically as Democrats and Republicans do today, and harbored, if anything, even greater distrust and distaste for each other. In the presidential election of 1800, the allies of Thomas Jefferson hinted that his opponent, John Adams, was a secret monarchist bent on restoring the kind of regime against which the colonies had successfully rebelled. The Adams camp claimed that Jefferson was a North American version of the Jacobins, who had shed so much blood in the French Revolution.
This animosity did not cripple the American government, because that government, presiding as it did over a small agrarian country far removed from