Sheila weighs in on the results of the recent elections and what they say about the current state of polarization in our country.
What do the midterm election results mean for America?
As a futurologist, I read many articles predicting and prognosticating about the 2022 Midterms. They were all wrong. Why? Because history and polls do not always tell the full story.
History tells us that the midterms would typically be a referendum on a sitting President’s poor approval ratings like the “wave” elections of 1994 and 2006. Talking heads described voter sentiment using the famous words of campaign strategist James Carville from the 1992 elections, “it’s the economy, stupid.” But many moderate Republicans and independents voted for Democrats. Johnson County and Kansas are great examples of this shift. The red wave didn’t come here. Why?
Are voters simply tired of upheaval and the bitterness of politics?
While voters clearly seemed to reject election deniers, I’m not as hopeful that political polarization is over. Why? It is human nature. “As it does in the body, calcification produces hardening and rigidity: People are more firmly in place and harder to move away from their predispositions,” the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck write in their recent book, The Bitter End. “Growing calcification is a logical consequence of growing polarization.”
An October NBC News poll found that 80 percent of Democrats and Republicans “believe the political opposition poses a threat that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.” That same poll found that “two-thirds of reliable Democratic and Republican voters say they’d still support their party’s political candidate, even if that person had a moral failing that wasn’t consistent with their own values.”
What can we do to stop polarization?
We can’t continue to hold our noses and vote for the candidate that lacks character but commits to destroying the other side. We must grow and vote for politicians with strong values and character because competence is directly correlated to those human attributes.
Until then, the pendulum will continue to swing wide. We may have just witnessed a slight movement back to the middle, but without leaders with strong character in office, it will be a long time before we can once again eat Thanksgiving dinner with relatives and talk politics.