Enough With the Polarization Porn

Polarization doomsaying can obscure the fact that it's still possible to save our democracy by practicing democracy.

Last year in the New York Times, we warned of the risks from consuming too much “polarization porn”. While it is healthy to acknowledge growing division in our country and a reduction in classic “swing districts”, it is dangerous to exclude the reality that can save our democracy in the here and now.

Swing voters exist, candidate quality matters, and the lack of investment in winnable stretch districts may be as much of a problem as polarization.

After the midterms, a headline in The Hill blared “Only 10 percent of House races were competitive in midterms”. The underlying report, a midterm post-mortem from the group “Fix Our House”, shows how the polarization hawks cover up just how much competition we can have under our current system.

How do they arrive at the conclusion that 90% of House races are “uncompetitive”? By simply tallying up the number of races where the final margin ended up within 5 points and then declaring the rest “uncompetitive”. That means that a congressional election would be deemed “uncompetitive” even if it took just 2.51% of voters to flip the seat.

One of those “uncompetitive” districts was Michigan’s 7th, where $40 million was spent across both parties in 2022. The district, represented by Elissa Slotkin, was rated as a “toss-up” by Cook and other ratings agencies. Calling this seat uncompetitive is absurd!

Adam Frisch called out this market inefficiency in recounting how he nearly defeated Lauren Boebert. As described in our Win The Middle case study video, “we had to flip one out of every 20 voters from Trump.”

Similar to the math Frisch recounts en route to declaring his candidacy, a candidate could flip one of this report’s “uncompetitive” districts by flipping just 1 in 24 voters.

The seat Frisch ran for — Colorado’s 3rd — was considered competitive in the “Fix Our House” retrospective. But it was not considered competitive in another recent analysis hyping polarization, this one by Cook Political Report.

The Washington Post’s review captures the theme of the report  (“New report outlines the deep political polarization’s slow and steady march”), which commemorates the 25th anniversary of Cook’s hallmark Partisan Voting Index (PVI) by mourning “The Incredible Shrinking Swing Seat 1997-2023”.

Cook defines a “swing seat” as follows:

Today, just 82 of 435 districts sport Cook PVI scores between R+5 and D+5 — our traditional definition of what constitutes a “swing seat.” That's down exactly 50% from the high-water mark of 164 back in 1999. Since then, “R+5 or More” seats have jumped from 150 to 189, while “D+5 or More” seats have jumped from 121 to 164. That means Democrats need to win about 66% of swing seats to win the majority today, up from 59% back in 1999.

This is true and has serious implications for American politics and culture. But one of those implications should be elevating the importance of leaders who can break through this reality! Cook’s frame misses potentially flippable seats like Lauren Boebert’s aforementioned CO-03, which has a PVI of R+7 and saw Adam Frisch come within just 546 votes of victory last cycle — with no national investment.

In the Cook analysis, a seat that went to a recount is not a “swing seat”. In the Fix Our House analysis, a swing seat where $40 million was spent is “uncompetitive”.

Polarization hawks come in many forms: independent analysts like Cook, advocacy groups like Fix Our House, and pundits like “Why We’re Polarized” author and New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. Independently, they are doing their jobs well. Collectively, they neglect the upshot of their own observations: that growing polarization at the fringes makes volatility among the depolarized voters in the middle the defining feature of modern politics.

Instead of acknowledging this fact and countering it by investing in depolarizers like Frisch, we are inundated with a barrage of stories about how the blue are getting bluer, the red are getting redder, and our democracy lacks meaningful competition.

This democracy “doom loop” manifests in a number of ways. Not only does it make voters and political practitioners alike pessimistic about the future of our politics, but it can distract from actually practicing democracy in potentially competitive stretch districts like those highlighted in our “Conceding Democracy” reports.

In a world where everyone accepts that polarization is insurmountable, Democrats are going to be less inclined to place bets on the kinds of low-likelihood but high-ROI races that will defeat Trumpism and secure a sustainable governing majority for the party. This is bad for Democrats and democracy (and, as Matt Yglesias has pointed out, the mental health of progressives).

Some of the rules need to change. That’s important work that will make defending democracy easier over the long term. But the rules won’t change this season, and there are quite a few big games on the schedule.

Instead of buying into the view that our politics are stuck in a doom loop, what if we broke it? 

What if the best way to protect our democracy is by practicing democracy?

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