Paul Waldman says come Nov. 2, the parties will continue their decades-long shift away from each other.
This sorting-out of the two parties helped clarify their ideological identities, but the Republicans who got elected became more and more conservative. Something similar was happening with Democrats — but not nearly to the same extent. As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote in their 2005 book Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, “The parties are indeed moving apart, but by no means at the same rate or from a fixed central point. Rather, Republicans are galloping right while Democrats are trotting left.”
