Today the urban party is also the party of gay marriage and gun control. That results in our political disagreements being drawn into the urban-rural divide. Democrats gerrymander, too, but often the most they can achieve is to neutralize their underlying disadvantage. Gerrymandering, a particularly American practice, allows Republicans to amplify their advantages in the political map. In the United States, two features make this polarization even more powerful. Rodden argues, is a feature of any democracy that draws winner-take-all districts atop a map where the left is concentrated in cities. If a party wins 50 percent of the votes, it doesn’t matter much if those votes are evenly spread around or tightly clustered.īritain, Australia and Canada, unlike much of Europe, have the same majoritarian system the United States does, and urban-rural divides appear there, too. Legislators are elected from larger districts, each with multiple representatives, granting parties proportional power. In most European democracies, geography doesn’t matter in the same way. It explains why Hillary Clinton carried only three of eight congressional districts in Minnesota - districts drawn by a panel of judges - even as she won the whole state. It explains why Republicans are routinely overrepresented in state legislatures, even in blue states like New York. This helps explain why Republicans have controlled the Pennsylvania State Senate for nearly four decades, despite losing statewide votes about half that time. “This other problem is a lot less obvious.” “That’s an obvious problem for Democrats,” Mr. Yes, the Senate gives rural areas (and small states) disproportionate strength. But the problem runs deeper, according to Jonathan Rodden, a Stanford political scientist: The American form of government is uniquely structured to exacerbate the urban-rural divide - and to translate it into enduring bias against the Democratic voters, clustered at the left of the accompanying chart. Urban voters, and the party that has come to represent them, now routinely lose elections and power even when they win more votes.ĭemocrats have blamed the Senate, the Electoral College and gerrymandering for their disadvantage. It’s true across many industrialized democracies that rural areas lean conservative while cities tend to be more liberal, a pattern partly rooted in the history of workers’ parties that grew up where urban factories did.īut urban-rural polarization has become particularly acute in America: particularly entrenched, particularly hostile, particularly lopsided in its consequences.
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