Red-Blue Roundtable: Bill Bishop

The sign outside my local elementary school last spring wished students a "great summer" in a typical Travis Heights way: "Whatever Higher Power(s) You May Or May Not Believe In...YEE HA!"

Gender neutral, faith neutral, God neutral...that's my neighborhood here in Austin, Texas. In 2000, George Bush came in behind both Al Gore AND Ralph Nader in Travis Heights. When 70 percent of Texas voted in favor of a ban on gay marriage, my precinct voted 90% against. In my zip code, 90% of the federal election contributions this year went to Democrats.

Oh, and one more thing. Travis Heights Elementary is exactly one block from the house where liberal writer Molly Ivins lived. (If Molly were still alive and writing, our zip code would be bright blue on the Amazon book map.)

To the cable television boys who finger paint on the electoral map, Texas is always solid red. (The CNN guy never taps his digit down in our direction.) But here, in the neighborhood where I live, we're bluer than Vermont. And that's the point about all those red and blue state maps. They are good for showing what has been a remarkably static division in the Electoral College. But they miss how people are living and, I suspect, buying books.

The divisions state to state are real, but they are nothing compared to how Americans are sorting themselves from community to community. Statistician Bob Cushing and I traced the votes at the county level from 1948 to 2004 in our book The Big Sort. We could see that majorities, Republican or Democratic, were piling up in communities. The last five presidential elections have been as close as any in the last 100 years. But an increasing number of people live in counties where elections aren't close at all, where either one party or another wins in a landslide.

So, in 1976 — the nearly dead-even contest between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford — about a quarter of all voters lived in a county where one side or the other won by 20 points or more. By 2004 — the nearly dead-even contest between John Kerry and George W. Bush — almost a half of all voters lived in places, like Travis Heights, where 20 points or more decided the election.

When you look at local voting results over time, you see that counties tip Republican or Democratic, and then they keep tipping as more Republicans move into Republican counties and Democrats cluster in Democratic communities. (Or, at the same time, counties grow increasingly lopsided as members of the minority party decamp for more politically hospitable environs.)

One half of U.S. voters live in counties that have remained unchanged in their presidential preference since 1980; 60 percent live in counties that have not changed since 1988; and nearly 73 percent live in counties that have not changed since 1992. Orange and Los Angeles counties in California are side by side, but local political majorities have been growing in opposite directions since 1976, a phenomenon found in two-thirds of U.S. communities.

Our sense is that people aren't moving to be around others who feel as they did about the Iraq War or single-payer health plans. People are clustering around others who live as they do — people who have similar lifestyles, who read similar kinds of books. And every four years those ways of life align with political party.

Marketing folks have known for some time that demographic factors have little meaning these days. People don't define themselves as "single, male, college-educated, 25 to 35 years of age." They think of themselves as environmentalists, car-racing enthusiasts, or, as one woman told me, "I'm an ocean-oriented person." They know that to learn about another's politics you consider the way they live, not their age, race, or level of education. In a radio talk show in Minneapolis, three callers told me they realized they had moved into a community with political opposites when they saw their neighbors using lawn chemicals. (It was a public radio show, in case you couldn't tell.)

Politics these days aren't about issues. People don't line up with a party because they agree with a set of policy position papers. One political scientist described the choice of a political party this way: You have a choice of attending one of two parties being held in two rooms off the same hall. You look into each room and you look at the people — how they appear, their gestures, what they're wearing. You get a vibe and then you join with the group you think is most like you.

You might even look at the books they are reading.

That's how people pick neighborhoods these days. It's also how they pick churches and civic clubs. It's the reason people with college degrees are clustering in particular cities and why some places are succeeding economically while others are slipping further behind.

That's The Big Sort. And it plays out more in culture, in books, than in politics. --Bill Bishop

See the whole Red-Blue Roundtable.