According to a new Esquire-NBC News survey, America is by far not as divided as recent fighting in Washington would suggest. According to the wide-reaching, bipartisan Aug. 5-11 survey, 66 percent feel that America is still the greatest country in the world, 54 percent feel that the United States is still a model for other nations, 81 percent feel that the United States can no longer afford to pay for foreign aid at the expense of domestic needs and 70 percent feel that the rich are getting richer at the expense of everyone else.
Sixty-four percent of Americans support gay marriage; 63 percent support first trimester abortions for any reasons; 52 percent support marijuana legalization; 62 percent support paid maternity leave; 57 percent support tax-subsidized childcare and 67 percent support a federal minimum wage hike of no less than $10 per hour. This newly-defined center also supports offshore drilling (81 percent) and the death penalty (64 percent).
Most concerning, the new American center, which is 78 percent White, has a hard view on America’s growing diversity. Only 35 percent of the center — compared with 87.5 percent of the liberal left and 29 percent of the conservative right — feel that the nation needs laws to protect the rights of minorities who face prejudice in the workplace. Forty-two percent of this center — compared with 18 percent of the left and 59 percent of the right — feel that “racial discrimination is nowhere near as widespread as it was 60 years ago and our laws should be modernized to reflect the changes in attitude.”
Another 64 percent of the new center report being less than hopeful about the country’s future in light of increasing diversity, with 35 percent being anxious.
The new center favors the ending of affirmative action in hiring and college admission decisions (57 percent), favors photo identification to vote (58 percent), the denial of a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants now residing in the United States (54 percent) and the belief that “racial tensions” in the nation will turn violent in the near future (40 percent). Sixty-three percent believe that in respecting the rights of minorities, “we’ve limited the rights of a majority of Americans.”
This presents a troubling glimpse of the political conversation to come, as the new center’s policies are markedly anti-minority. As the nation moves forward with an ever-increasing rate of voting access challenges — including North Carolina’s unprecedented suite of voting disenfranchisement laws and the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Title V of the 1965 Voting Rights Act — and copes with racial polarization due to governmental policies like “stop-and-frisk” and “stand your ground” as well as a general lack of cultural sensitivity, these trends suggest that in the years ahead, things will get worse for race relations before they get better.
Racial bias and politics
In attempting to ascertain why these seemingly anti-minority feelings exist in the center, one needs to look at the role that politics play in the national conversation. In March, the Republican National Convention offered the Growth & Opportunity Project, an “autopsy” of the Republican Paarty’s performance in the 2012 presidential election and how the party must move in order to be viable in the future. According to the report, the need to attract non-White voters is “obvious and immediate”:
“Unless the RNC gets serious about tackling this problem, we will lose future elections; the data demonstrates this. In both 2008 and 2012, President Obama won a combined 80 percent of the votes of all minority voters, including not only African Americans but also Hispanics, Asians, and others. The minority groups that President Obama carried with 80 percent of the vote in 2012 are on track to become a majority of the nation’s population by 2050. Today these minority groups make up 37 percent of the population, and they cast a record 28 percent of the votes in the 2012 presidential election, according to the election exit polls, an increase of 2 percentage points from 2008. We have to work harder at engaging demographic partners and allies.
“By 2050, the Hispanic share of the U.S. population could be as high as 29 percent, up from 17 percent now. The African American proportion of the population is projected to rise slightly to 14.7 percent, while the Asian share is projected to increase to approximately 9 percent from its current 5.1 percent. Non-Hispanic whites, 63 percent of the current population, will decrease to half or slightly less than half of the population by 2050.”
The reality is that there is a significant portion of the Republican Party that does not support such outreach efforts. For most of the members of the House Republican Conference, Republicans control of a majority of the state houses while gerrymandering has created a situation in which the majority of Republican-controlled districts are “safe” from Democratic challenge. For example, in 2012 — despite Democrats taking the majority of the nationwide vote — Republicans managed to hold on to the House.
This created a situation in which the majority of House Republicans are not interested in appeasing the Democrats or moderates in their districts, but avoiding a primary challenge from a candidate that appeals more to the Republican base. This in turn is creating a situation in which the political right is moving farther from the middle and in which political divisions are becoming more extreme. As the political discussions become public, the divisive attitudes are absorbed wholesale — particularly, by those connected to the punditry advocating such divisiveness.
For example, among “talk radio heads” — the most conservative group of respondents the Esquire survey polled, who are described as “alpha male conservatives who want government to ban abortion and support traditional marriage but otherwise stay out of our private lives” — 85 percent were pessimistic about the future of the economy over the next two to three years, compared to 29 percent of “bleeding hearts,” the most progressive of the polled groups. According to Pew Research, Americans are the most politically polarized between Republicans and Democrats now than at any other time in the last 25 years.
The hidden middle
But in that lies the rub. According to the Esquire survey, only 37 percent of all respondents identify themselves as Democrats and only 32 percent as Republicans. The remaining 31 percent said that they are independents that voted for Democrats and Republicans equally. While it is true that the Republicans and Democrats are pulling farther apart, most Americans see themselves in the middle, apart from the partisan bickering. Most Americans don’t have anti-minority views; they just have no hard opinions on the topic, at all.
“What’s really coming through here,” said Democratic pollster Daniel Franklin, who helped conduct the survey, “is that the center is focused on their own personal finances, and with their anxious feelings about the national economy, they just want to make sure everyone is treated fairly when it comes to the economy.”
For the most part, the poll shows that class and not race is the defining characteristic in defining obstacles to upward mobility. Only 5 percent of the new center expressed support for the notion that America is the land of opportunity for all. Thirty-one percent feel that it is doubtful that everyone will receive a chance to work themselves into the middle class.
After all, 56 percent of the new center voted for Barack Obama in 2012.
What can be drawn from all of this is the fact that those who decry that the nation is irreversibly split are only partially seeing the issue. There is indeed a political center in America, it is concerned about the growing wealth gap and it is big enough and vocal enough to drive the political conversation — not only in 2016, but for the foreseeable future to come.