I've been known to whine that there are too few political science blogs laying around for me to steal ideas from, so I'm glad to welcome The Monkey Cage to the blogosphere, and to do so by, er, stealing an idea. Summarizing a paper called "The Myth of a Polarized America," David Park argues that it's elites who are polarized, not the electorate, and that voters are less divided than you might imagine. Here, for instance, Park plots mean ideology for the US, for urban New Yorkers, and for rural Taxans, on a scale ranging for -1 (very liberal) to positive 1 (very conservative).
You'll note two things. First, this graph doesn't stretch all the way to 1 on either end. It stops at .5. So the level of polarization is even less than this graph, on first glance, suggests. Meanwhile, as the Monkey Cagers note, “the liberal fair-trade coffee-drinking Per Se-dining New Yorker is closer to the US median than the conservative truck-drivin' Toby Keith-lovin' Texan.” I'm not actually sure where this gets us, as I don't think Democratic surrogates will really win points by footnoting political science papers when the cable networks call them out-of-touch, but it's useful knowledge to squirrel away somewhere. It's not terribly surprising though. It's actually the culture of "elite liberals" -- which tends to be shared by the journalists and ad men in question - which is being defined as out of the American mainstream, not their political opinions. Somehow, the consumption -- or lack thereof -- of fair trade coffee has become a more important signifier of whether someone is in the political mainstream than whether they support universal health care.
