Polarized Electorate Ideology

As the presidential elections heat up, candidates will spend millions on public opinion polls. Candidates will fund surveys on issues and see where voters stand. In this two-party system will these polls actually reveal anything for republicans or democrats? In a country with over 318 million, people there are varying ideologies and attitudes. Some like Adam Abramowitz author of The Polarized Electorate suggests that these ideologies and attitudes reveal a deeply divided polarized electorate among the electorate. On the other hand, in his From Culture War: The Myth of a Polarized America, Morris Fiorina argues that these ideologies and attitudes depict a closely divided electorate. While bias is almost certain in any poll, after an analysis …show more content…
First of all, Table 3 presents the beliefs and perceptions of red and blue states. To be clear, red and blue states do not represent partisanship, but rather the way a state voted. While the numbers and data of Table 3 show that red and blue states are generally on the same page in terms of ideology, there are some discrepancies in Fiorina’s methodology. For one, it appears that Fiorina’s data is compiled by averaging the responses of blue states and red states. This artificially creates a purple America and distorts the data as blue states and red states are very different from each other. By doing this, ideologies are jumbled together and lost in translation. Even when doing this, Fiorina’s data still shows that there is some polarization caused by ideology. For instance, in Table 3, 44 percent of respondents in blue states and only 32 percent of respondents in red states strongly believe that “Immigrants strengthen our country”. This means there is at least a 12 percent difference amongst red and blue states. Furthermore, the “strongly supporting statement” suggests that there were more than two options in the poll. This induces bias as it gives respondents the ability to answer somewhere in the