Home > Postcards > Archives > 2008 > May > 08 > Entry
‘The Big Sort’
Is there really a way to know whether a neighborhood leans Republican or Democratic without studying voting records?
Author Bill Bishop says there are signs. He means that literally.
Speaking today at an event hosted by the Center for Politics and Governance at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, Bishop showed a photo of a sign in his heavily Democratic Travis Heights neighborhood that said, “Impeach.” He also showed a sign at BookPeople advertising a Darwin Day event. Not the kind of signs you see in heavily Republican areas.
In his new book, “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing us Apart,” the former Statesman reporter writes that for the past three decades, Americans have been sorting themselves into homogeneous communities, churches and clubs.
“The middle has dropped out of everything,” Bishop said.
There’s been a big focus on red states and blue states, but Bishop and co-author Robert Cushing, a retired UT sociology professor, looked at a smaller area: the county. They found that Americans are much more likely than they were 30 years ago to live in counties where one party won by a large margin, 20 percentage points or more. Even though the presidential election in 2004 was very close, nearly half of voters lived in communities where the election was not at all close, the book says.
“As Americans have moved over the past three decades, they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and in the end, politics,” Bishop wrote.
Bishop plans to talk about “The Big Sort” at BookPeople on May 28 at 7 p.m.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Elections
Comments
Click here to report comment abuse.