The bifurcated map of red and blue states is, perhaps, the most recognizable symbol of the current state of American politics. So familiar is this map that many of us, even scholars of American politics, take it for granted. But the seeming permanence of the regional divide between blue coasts and a red interior masks two important trends: first, that this geographic divide has not always existed, and second, that despite this regional stability, who governs is now characterized by instability—the pattern of control in national government changes, nearly on an election-to-election basis.
Red Fighting Blue helps us to recognize and make sense of this state of affairs. Both scholars and the lay public ask whether and why America is becoming more geographically, politically, and culturally polarized. Hopkins’s answer is that it is not so simple as to say America is polarized; rather, we must understand how polarization is shaped by institutions. He argues that winner-take-all rules, combined with the increased alignment of geographically sorted cultural issues with partisanship, amplify the partisan divisions within states, leaving us with a stable red and blue map and control of government often decided by a handful of evenly matched battleground states. This explanation allows us to understand the peculiar stable yet unstable nature of American politics and to avoid oversimplistic explanations of recent trends, such as politics being shaped by a “culture war” or a “big sort.” As Hopkins puts it: “Acknowledging the inherent complications that arise from the interaction between the behavior of voters and the mechanics of American political institutions may not leave us with a tidy or viscerally satisfying conclusion, but it boasts the advantage of accurately characterizing the nature of democratic representation in the United States” (p. 227).
The absoluteness of this stability is laid out nicely in the opening chapter when we see that correlation between state-level vote share in 2012 and 2016 was 0.96—a statistic that is easy to calculate but jarring to see in print. Consider how all the twisting and turning of American politics seem unable to shake this regional division. As the author points out, the “red-versus-blue arrangement of regional partisanship” has “unusual persistence,” “despite a steady parade of new events, issues, and candidates across the political stage” (p. 37). By some models of politics, where voters respond to any number of variables, from candidate quality to policy issues, this lack of variation is difficult to explain. But by reminding us of the importance of electoral rules, he helps us to make sense of this persistence.
Hopkins’s thesis is straightforward: The parties, because they have become more nationalized, have formed distinctive regional divisions. This is because the winner-take-all system means that parties are unable to adapt to the more local contours that divide voters within regions—say, the difference between New York City and the rest of the state. The national agendas that now characterize parties have appeals that vary significantly across regions, say, New York and Nebraska, based on regional differences in moral and cultural issues. Thus, parties respond to a system that gives them no incentive to pay attention to the minority by doubling down on the thin cultural divide, with Democrats and Republicans both choosing to amplify the cultural divide because they have little hope of being victorious in the other’s region.
Hopkins draws on an array of historical and cross-sectional trends to support his thesis. The first three chapters are largely historical, showing just how geographically polarized America has become and how this compares to the past. Chapter 4, departing from party and office-level variation, focuses on voter behavior and argues that decisions by politicians to elevate the salience of cultural issues brought these regional and partisan divisions back to life from their nadir in the mid to late twentieth century. Chapter 5 shows the consequences of these regional trends in a Congress that is increasingly polarized. Chapter 6, the final substantive chapter, goes below the state level to examine the urban/rural divide in American politics. Ultimately, with Hopkins tracing the rise of regional stability, we come to understand how some states became permanent battlegrounds, leaving us with a nice combination of historical evidence and contemporary relevance.
There are some trends that beg to be explored further, like why regions are culturally different in the first place and why these differences persist. Nevertheless, this book is largely satisfying and does what good academic work should do: explains trends that we have an intuitive sense are present and feel are important, yet defy simple explanation.
A geographer reading this book might rightly point out the difficulty created by the problem of scale, which is that the choice of unit size, for example, county versus state, may affect inference. In some respects, this is exactly Hopkins’s point, that the aggregating of votes into red and blue states makes voters look more polarized than they really are. But it also reveals a limitation to the state-level analysis: Much of the interesting geographic variation in American politics may happen at the substate level. Indeed, the divisions between rural and urban parts of states are striking and seem to capture much of the current divide in American politics. The author does not totally ignore these divisions, which are often harder to quantify because they do not align with political boundaries, but they receive, perhaps, an unsatisfying level of attention in the book.
Additionally, Hopkins is, of course, telling a causal story. His argument is that with different geography or different rules, American politics would have a different shape. The difficulty in showing this is that we only observe one set of rules in American politics, and these rules have, basically, not changed; so there is no over-time variation to inform us about the effect of these rules. Possible solutions might be to look cross-nationally across places with different rules or to rely on formal theories that deduce the outcomes expected under different rules. Hopkins’s approach is more descriptive and so, ultimately, even if the causal effect of these rules makes intuitive sense, we cannot be entirely sure about the effects after reading this book.
Finally, the book raises, but leaves unexplained, something that is, in my opinion, still not understood in American politics: why states feel so culturally and politically different, despite the numerically thin divide in partisanship. Yes, we know that even very red and blue states are not politically homogenous: As Hopkins points out, Hillary Clinton won 43% of the two-party vote in South Carolina and Trump won 44% of the two-party vote in Oregon. So, if you went to Oregon, which we think of as a deep blue state, 4 or 5 out of every 10 people would be Trump supporters. Yes, the labeling of these states as red and blue based on the winner-take-all system creates a false sense of polarization. But my sense is that this polarization is not just a mirage.
If you go to a deep blue state like Massachusetts, it feels different from a deep red state like Mississippi. Some of this perception is simply the difference between big cities and small towns, but there is something more profound going on. Mississippi and Massachusetts are on different sides of a divide in cultural and economic systems that launched the Civil War and has shaped national politics ever since. Comparing life on the ground in the two states, it is hard to see them as only thinly divided. We still do not have the tools as political scientists to explain these differences. Hopkins recognizes this, saying that these cultural divides are real, but also saying (correctly) that electoral rules make politics “systematically insensitive to the preferences of electoral minorities—even those of substantial size” (p. 145). But attributing the divide to electoral rules is unsatisfying because this liberal (conservative) minority in Mississippi (Massachusetts), despite the numbers, does not seem of substantial size—the places are dominated by either liberalism or conservatism. Massachusetts and Mississippi just feel very different, in a way that is meaningful for politics, even if aggregate election returns suggest they are not.
This last point is beyond the scope of Red Fighting Blue, and these few criticisms aside, after reading it, we are left with a richer understanding of American politics. This is especially important in the current political milieu, when many of us, professional political scientists and not, are wondering just how divided we really are and how we got this way.
