One of the latest polls, from the Christian Science Monitor gets at this reality starkly. <\/a><\/p>\nIt reveals that while Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are essentially tied, the two men are incredibly polarizing figures when looked at from the perspective of our various “identity enclaves.”<\/p>\n
Obama is winning just 37% of the white vote, compared with 86% of the black and Hispanic vote. That’s a see-saw pattern with profound implications.<\/p>\n
Romney, meanwhile, is losing badly among women (40% to Obama’s 49%) but he absolutely dominates among white women (51% to 39%).<\/p>\n
Another dynamic that shapes the race pits our urban tribe (61% for Obama) against our rural tribe (51% for Romney).<\/p>\n
And the nation’s regions are also dramatically different, with the Northeast and the West solidly in Obama’s camp and the Midwest and the South tilting toward Romney.<\/p>\n
Obviously, a lot of these cultural dynamics overlap.<\/p>\n
The South and the Midwest are more rural than the rest of the US, and many small towns tend to be whiter than urban and suburban areas.<\/p>\n
One other remarkable thing is that with all of these patchwork-quilt differences, we still add up to a roughly 50-50 divided nation.<\/p>\n
It may be that in the future the rise of the Hispanic population and increasing urbanization will move us significantly in the Democrats’ direction, as some pundits have suggested.<\/p>\n
But for this election cycle, and the near-future, our various tribes have formed up into something like a stand-off.<\/p>\n
Whoever wins in November, it appears that roughly half of the population will leave the polls dissatisfied.<\/p>\n
Indeed, some of the factions that make up our society will be deeply grieved by the outcome, contributing to the sense that America is a democracy struggling to find its center.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The next half-year, Republicans and Democrats will churn out a lot of words, wrangling over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6548,6550,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5940"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}