(12-22-2017 09:23 AM)miko33 Wrote:  Or in reality - not at all. Interesting read. It appears that our elected officials are doing a poor job of addressing the ideals of the majority of the country. From what I can see, it's worse now than it has ever been in recent history. Compromise is a dirty word in today's political climate, and compromise is ultimately what the majority of the electorate want. It's why politicians make a mad dash for the "independents" - who appear now to be the new moderates as more people leave both parties due to ideology.

https://news.stanford.edu/2017/12/20/pol...ed-voters/

Quote:Despite widespread perceptions of rising political polarization in the United States, the American public is no more polarized than it was before the Reagan era, according to a Stanford scholar.

Morris Fiorina, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, studies elections and public opinion. He recently published the book, Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting and Political Stalemate, which draws on his prior research and a variety of new data on the American electorate. He is also the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science.

Quote:Are voters more polarized than ever?

No. Although pundits and politicos make that claim every day, it’s not true. If we take the electorate as a whole – without slicing it by partisanship, region or anything else – the public doesn’t look any different than it did in 1976.

Polarization is the grouping of opinion around two extremes. No matter how we measure public opinion, this has not happened. In 2016, more Americans classified themselves as moderates than as liberals or conservatives; moreover, the numbers are virtually identical to those registered in 1976. The distribution of partisan identification flatly contradicts the polarization narrative: self-classified Republicans are no larger a proportion of the public than in the Eisenhower era, while self-identified Democrats are a significantly smaller proportion than in the 1960s. Forty percent of today’s public declines to identify with either party.

Positions on specific issues support the same conclusion – the public favors a middle ground between the parties. On abortion, for example, the Democratic platform position is “any time, for any reason,” while the Republican position is “never, no exceptions.” The public says “sometimes, for some reasons.”

In 1976 the Democrats nominated a “born again” Sunday school teacher (Jimmy Carter) from Georgia and the Republicans a country club moderate (Jerry Ford) from Michigan. Ford carried California and Connecticut. Carter carried Texas and Mississippi. It’s hard to imagine that today.

For all the talk about "inevitability" and "permanent majorities," you just need to look at the map of the 1976 election. It looks to be almost the exact opposite of 2000-2012.

I think the nation has become more conservative on average. Can you imagine a president implementing wage and price controls as Richard Nixon did? But that conservatism is tempered by a much more libertarian bent on social issues.