The shape of polarization in America

We're not as badly divided as we think, and it's all thanks to nonwhite voters

It is cliché by now to say that the country is polarized. Despite the predictable nature of the polarization discourse, there’s strong empirical evidence for the underlying trend. You may have seen this animation from the Pew Research Center, for example.

The tl;dr of it is that while rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans used to agree on a lot, they now hardly agree on anything. When we think of a time that politics was less ideologically polarized, we think of a period like midcentury America, when you had a lot of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. But the reality is that politics was a lot like this at the turn of the millennium. In 2000, liberals only barely outnumbered conservatives in the Democratic coalition — 27 to 24 percent. Today, the liberal-to-conservative ratio among Democrats is more than three-to-one. 

The polarization story is often told in terms of the twin extinctions of the conservative white Southern Democrats and the liberal Northeastern Republicans…