An Ever Smaller Number of Swing Voters Will Decide the Presidential Election

From Jay Cost, at the Weekly Standard, "Polarization and the Independents":

Late last month, Gallup published a summary of President Obama’s job approval ratings for 2011. The pollster’s findings were stunning: Eighty percent of Democrats approved of the president’s performance through 2011, as did just 12 percent of Repub-licans. The difference between these two numbers—Gallup calls it the “party gap”—was a whopping 68 points.

This is not a novel development. Of the 10 largest party gaps in the poll’s storied history, 8 have occurred during the Obama and George W. Bush presidencies. Indeed, we have seen a very strong party gap in recent presidential elections as well. Obama won 89 percent of Democrats and 9 percent of Republicans in 2008, for a party gap of 80 points; the party gap for Bush in 2004 was 82 points. This is a stark shift from relatively recent political history. Richard Nixon’s party gap in 1972 was 54 points; Jimmy Carter’s in 1976 was 69 points; Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 was 67 points; and even Bill Clinton’s in 1996 was 71 points.

How do we account for this increasing polarization? Much of it has deep roots. From roughly the time of the Civil War to the Great Depression, the two parties were strictly regional coalitions built not on grand ideological divisions but on old antipathies from the battlefield. The Democrats usually won the South and the big Northern cities, while the Republicans typically won most everything else. This meant that both parties had liberals and conservatives in their ranks. Consider, for instance, the tumultuous decade of the 1910s. The Democrats had in their coalition conservative Tammany Hall and the borderline radical William Jennings Bryan; the Republicans had Nelson Aldrich, the machine boss of Rhode Island, and Robert La Follette, the premier progressive of Wisconsin.

This all began to change in the 1930s, when FDR worked to rebuild the Democratic party as a progressive coalition. Roosevelt destroyed Tammany Hall in favor of Fiorello LaGuardia, a nominal Republican and strong progressive.

Interesting.

Keep reading at the link.