Re: "The Big Sort": The Big Rebuttal, A Preview
"The way people lived - and the communities they lived in - shaped their political lives."
John Fenton, Midwest Politics (1966)
I've looked over election maps for a number of years. One time-killer I particularly loved while at UH-Downtown for a few semesters was to break out a county map of a state and color in the counties based on voting for Senators, Governors, and Presidents. I've probably done more Texas maps like this than I care to admit to and Dave Leip's fantastic website now saves me much of the effort. Beyond just doing this for the fun of it, you learn to see patterns develop that transcend individual candidates.
At a neighborhood level (say, within Harris County), you know the likelihood of Third Ward & Fifth Ward going Democratic as well as Kingwood & Spring going Republican. Those trends have stuck for quite some time. Again: place matters.
But places also change. Not immediately, not necessarily drastically ... but they change. Sharpstown is increasingly Asian and Hispanic in certain areas. In the 1950 and 60s, it was predominantly Jewish. Gulfton didn't exist. In 1994, Alief was a bastion of Republican and predominantly Anglo. Today, it's 60%-40% Dem, nearing an Hispanic majority, but with a vote base best defined as Multicultural (a more or less even mix of Anglo, Hispanic, African-American ... and in the case of Alief - Asian). If Bill Bishop's thesis is to be taken as correct, why that change? Clearly, like-minded people didn't move into Alief or Sharpstown. That underscores the challenge I have accepting the thesis at face value.
And yet, there does exist a very easy-to-grasp understanding of some truth in what Bishop describes. Republicans are increasingly segmented into Fox-viewing, church-going, Liberty-University-attending, small-town-living folk. And Dems are segmenting in similar ways that we see all around us. But my sense is that the value of "place" in that equation is exaggerated. Much of what I see Bishop describing might be more closely tied to the larger culture wars that have been going on since the mid-60s and the effect of race on both parties%
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