Between blue states and red states, it is easy to discern America’s geographic political polarization. Republicans move to reliably red states such as Texas, Florida, and Wyoming, while Democrats migrate similarly toward states such as Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Oregon. Subtler is the intrafamily polarization characteristic of today’s politics.
For its own part, geographic polarization is well documented. The New York Times reported an analysis of post-2020 presidential election voter registration records that demonstrates public intuition for the trend. Democratic voters tended to move to towns President Joe Biden had won while Republicans went for towns former President Donald Trump had won — each group by the same 19 percentage point margin.
Choosing a neighborhood based on political views has merits and drawbacks. For one, “life is less contentious when the people around you vote the way you do,” one New York Times interviewee said. It is easier, plain and simple, to settle somewhere with less burden of self-censorship or annoyance. And parents, as expected, have the incentive of moving to places with choice family policies and cultural norms.
The more we follow this heuristic, though, the less agreeable everything seems. Polarization is not a new phenomenon, but no one can deny its particular salience to the present political moment. The gender gap is a significant component for young people as men and women drift further apart. But so do older adults see division in whom they marry. In 2020, marriages between Democrats and Republicans were found to occur at a rate of about 4%, and it would not be surprising if this rate continued to drop. It is a good rule of thumb to marry someone with shared values, but this pattern has more to do with instantaneous aversion than time-tested argument.
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Contrary to the idea that women are trapped within their husbands’ ideologies, there are probably few of these unions in the first place. Impassioned voters are more intentional than ever about distancing themselves from other-party family members and friends, such as is the case with 36% of Generation Z and millennial liberals. One of many factors, such vehement polarization between relatives contributes to the family estrangement increasingly prevalent today.
Moving away from disagreeable neighbors is probably not going to worsen how on-the-offensive we are — it will just make outcomes easier to predict. The silent killer is the hatred slowly tearing apart close relationships and discouraging family support systems.