Indiana Alumni Magazine
Purple Politics?
IU political scientists reveal America's true colors
By Lee Ann Sandweiss
Illustration Dan May.
Since 1968 the majority of Hoosiers have voted for Republican presidential candidates. Thus, Indiana’s classification as a “red” state is justified, right?
Not so, say IU political scientists, pointing out that there are more Democratic than Republican mayors in the Hoosier state right now, and that there have been four Democratic and four Republican governors since 1964. They claim that Indiana, like a growing number of states, is neither red nor blue, but purple.
THE MYTH OF RED AND BLUE STATES
During the past two U.S. presidential elections, Americans couldn’t pick up a magazine or turn on their televisions without seeing maps that depicted the country divided between red and blue states, with red representing Republican voters and the blue Democratic. But while distinct differences do divide American voters, they are not as clear-cut as those maps portray them.
The notion that most of the U.S. is “purple,” instead of “red” or “blue,” isn’t meant to be seen as a new trend, says Marjorie Hershey, an IU Bloomington professor of political science whose research focuses on American political behavior. Rather, it’s a correction to the red-versus-blue argument.
In her teaching, Hershey uses a map produced by Robert J. Vanderbei, of Princeton University, that shows county-by-county 2004 election-return data across the U.S. One glance at Vanderbei’s map makes it clear that there are no “red” or “blue” states — the country is, for the most part, a purple mix of Republican and Democratic voters.
The term “purple state,” which is synonymous with swing state or battleground state, came into vogue during the hotly contested 2000 U.S. presidential election. A Gallup poll classified a state as purple if the margin of victory for either candidate was 5 percentage points or less.
“The purple argument says that calling states red or blue distorts the differences between them,” Hershey says. “It suggests that the amount of political conflict isn’t nearly as dramatic as has been portrayed in some of the media. But even the purple argument does agree that there has been polarization in the U.S. — it’s just not as clear-cut as the ‘red states versus blue states’ description implies.”
Robert Dion, PhD’00, who teaches political science at the University of Evansville, agrees with Hershey. “The red-blue delineation is not particularly helpful,” he says, “because it’s way too simplistic and reductionist. It would seem to suggest that a state is either overwhelmingly conservative and Republican or overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic.
“To be sure, there are some states like that — think of Wwyoming, for example — but this either-or construction doesn’t allow for shades of blue and red, and it obscures differences within states between urban and rural counties.”
As Vanderbei’s map reveals, each county in the nation is a mix of colors in proportion to the results for that county — the key word here being “mix.” Furthermore, in the 2004 election, a surprising number of states with Democratic governors — including Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Kansas — voted for the incumbent Republican president.
Indiana’s performance at the polls has been a mixed bag, too, says Dion.
“Indiana is reliably Republican in presidential contests going back to 1964, but it has had, at the same time, a habit of electing Democratic governors, senators, mayors, state legislators, and so on,” he says. “So, is it a Republican state or a two-party battleground?”
This county-by-county map of 2004 election results suggests the red-versus-blue analysis to be a different shade than portrayed.
POLARIZATION PATTERNS — PAST AND PRESENT
While the purple effect is not a new phenomenon, the extremity of political polarization represented by party choice is, according to IU-trained political scientists Geoffrey Layman, MA’92, PhD’95, and Thomas Carsey, PhD'95.
Former students of Hershey’s and friends since graduate school, Layman and Carsey are working together on a book, tentatively titled Parties at the Poles: Conflict Extension in American Politics. They say that the country is more polarized than it has been in decades, with the parties’ elites and activists even more polarized than the officeholders.
Which came first, party polarization among elected officials and political activists or party polarization in the mass electorate? Polarization at the level of political leaders and activists clearly is the chicken, and what has happened in the American public is the egg, explains Layman, an associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland.
“The reason that Democrats and Republicans in the mass electorate are moving farther apart in the views on political issues is that the policy alternatives they are offered by the leaders of the two parties are, themselves, moving farther and farther apart,” he says.
“The net result is that the Democrats and Republicans as groups are now more ideologically consistent internally and more ideologically divergent externally than they have been in quite some time,” adds a professor of political science at University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.
Hershey, author of the best-selling text Party Politics in America, says that to better understand today’s polarization, it is necessary to examine shifts in the two dominant political parties over the past 50 years.
She says the most striking aspect of this polarization, and one of the main causes of it, has been the very long-term change in party identification among southern whites. In the 1950s, white southerners were uniformly Democrats, but as the Democratic-dominated federal government passed and began to administer civil rights laws (the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Act of 1965), conservative white southerners, a little at a time, reacted to these policy changes by moving away from their Democratic identification — first to independence and finally to republicanism, Hershey explains.
“The partisan migration of southern whites slowed in the 1970s, but sped up again after Ronald Reagan became president in 1981,” she says.
Hershey says that many Republican leaders encouraged this change by allying with Christian conservatives — many of whom are southern whites — and bringing their stands on issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and prayer in the schools into the Republican platform.
The consequence was that by the 1990s, southern whites were largely Republican. At the same time, as these southern conservatives left the Democratic Party, the Democrats were left with a more homogeneous group of supporters as well, dominated by liberal groups on both coasts, in big cities in between, and among African Americans.
Instead of the party alignment of the 1950s, in which a Democratic Party was made up of conservative white southerners and liberal black citizens, and a Republican Party that was composed of northeastern moderates as well as doctrinal conservatives, we now have two national parties that are less diverse internally, says Hershey.
“We now have a national Republican Party that’s generally conservative — at least by American standards — and a national Democratic Party that’s generally liberal,” she says. “Many voters have brought their party ID in line with their liberal or conservative beliefs, or changed their beliefs to match their party.”
Marjorie Hershey, IU professor of political science, sees different ways to look at politics. Photo Kendall Reeves, Spectrum Studio.
MODERATES AND THE MEDIA
Despite the reconfiguration of party loyalties and the increased polarization of party platforms, there is a significant moderate middle remaining among the American voters, according to IU experts. However, that is not the picture painted by the media for a number of reasons, all of which have to do with building the largest possible audience.
“Conflict is infinitely more newsworthy than cooperation, and simplicity is much more appealing than complexity and nuance,” says Dion. “Political junkies tend to forget that the average person is not excessively interested in political developments or the intricacies of public policies. Dividing the world into red and blue makes for an interesting narrative for political journalists who feel a constant pressure to simplify the news and present a compelling storyline.”
Layman wholeheartedly agrees.
“The red-blue metaphor is greatly oversimplified, as are the ‘two Americas’ or ‘culture war’ metaphors that the media often use interchangeably with red-blue. The red-blue and other metaphors fit well with the way the media’s long-held predispositions for describing political conflict, as well as their need to exaggerate conflict,” he says. “It’s just not terribly useful for the rest of us when we try to understand what’s going on in the political world.”
The bottom line? Let the viewer and reader beware.
“I think it’s always a good idea to be a critical consumer of media coverage,” says Hershey. “As one of my students said recently, the media report ‘news’ rather than ‘olds,’ even though sometimes the ‘olds’ are more characteristic of the forces that affect us on a regular basis.”
A HAZY CRYSTAL BALL
When asked if they cared to make a prediction for the midterm and 2008 elections, the IU experts were unified in their belief that, like it or not, we probably will be seeing more of the same — politicians mobilizing the party base rather than appealing to the center.
“Everyone who watches elections learned in 2000 to be very careful forecasting outcomes, but I would say there is little reason to expect changes in the short run,” says Carsey.
In the long term, he says, there are some signs suggesting that a small number of conservative Christians are starting to diverge a bit from the current conservative Republican stand on some issues, like the environment and social services for the poor. Should this group grow, it could begin to erode the conservative coalition.
Similarly, he adds, there is a growing African-American middle class that has begun to show more support for the economic and spending policies of the Republican Party. If this trend continues, the strong ties between African Americans and the Democratic Party could begin to erode as well.
“But, if these trends are to materialize, they are likely to unfold gradually for some time, potentially sparked down the road by some political activist looking to push such a development,” Carsey says. 
Lee Ann Sandweiss is a Bloomington, Ind.-based publications consultant. Her Web site is www.sandweisspublicationservices.com.