The New York Times article posed as a "fun" interactive quiz but hid some nasty Republican sliming in the text, accusing the GOP of conspiring to hold on to office via “voter suppression or attempts to skew the census” : “Quiz: Let Us Predict Whether You’re a Democrat or a Republican.”
It’s a creation of Sahil Chinoy, a graphics editor for the Times Opinion section, similar to his previous “graphics” story in July, in which one of his graphics showed a major swerve to the left by the Democrats since 2008 but which was downplayed in the text, in favor of the story’s intended takeaway of Republicans careening toward the “far right.”
The latest is another anti-Republican smear job couched in benign quiz terms:
Tell us a few details about you and we’ll guess which political party you belong to. It shouldn’t be that simple, right? We’re all complex people with a multiplicity of identities and values. But the reality is that in America today, how you answer a handful of questions is very likely to determine how you vote.
This quiz, based on recent surveys with more than 140,000 responses, presents a series of yes-or-no questions to predict whether someone is more likely to identify as a Democrat or a Republican. It captures divisions that should make you worried about the future of American democracy.
The questions concerned race, religion, education and age.
Sorting has occurred on both sides, but the Republican Party has tended more toward homogeneity: whiter, more Christian and more conservative. Democrats are a far more diverse party. So although the term “identity politics” is often wielded to criticize the Democrats for focusing on race and gender, Republicans are typically more susceptible to appeals based on their shared identity than Democrats....
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The partisan gap between black and white voters is the most durable and powerful split in modern American politics. Soon after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, he remarked, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” He wasn’t wrong. Afterward, the Republicans courted racist white voters by opposing school and housing integration.
Among white people, religion is the most stable and important determinant of party choice. But the way religion shapes party attachment has changed. Today, the best way to sort the population of white voters is not by which religion they belong to, but by how religious they are.
The number of religious white Americans is plummeting. In the long term, that spells disaster for Republicans. “I don’t think the Republican Party right now has a sustainable business model,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University.
Then it got super-partisan. What is the sentence in bold below doing in a supposedly fun political quizlet?
The party knows this. Or at least it should. After Republicans lost the 2012 election, the party leadership commissioned a report on how to move forward. One answer was clear: appeal to nonwhite and less conservative voters. But in the years since, the Republicans -- led by Mr. Trump -- have doubled down on white identity politics and seem to believe that their path to a majority is through gerrymandering, voter suppression or attempts to skew the census.
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Some political scientists have attributed the emergent “diploma divide” to less educated white voters’ racial resentment. Dr. Sides, Dr. Tesler and Dr. Vavreck argue that during Barack Obama’s presidency, less-educated white people who may not have followed politics began to link the Democrats to progressive attitudes toward race and fled the party as a result....
Add sexism to the mix as well as racism.
The partisan gender gap developed in the 1980s as men drifted toward the Republican Party; it widened in the 2016 Trump versus Clinton election. Much like racial resentment explains support for Mr. Trump, researchers have found that “hostile sexism” -- measured by asking questions like whether someone believes women seek to control men -- is increasingly dividing the parties.
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And because partisan identities tend to be deeply held, political events rarely shake adults’ party preferences, which means the resentment from identity-based polarization probably isn’t going to spontaneously dissolve. In fact, it might get worse. Dr. Abramowitz writes in his book “The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump” that polarizing forces -- increased racial diversity, the waning influence of religion and the rise of partisan media -- are “far from spent.”
Chinoy snuck in left-wing talking points from political scientist Nathan Kalmoe.
Though America isn’t facing a civil war right now, he writes, “the country is in an uncomfortably similar position today,” with “racial-religious-partisan alignments, political demonization, rhetoric rejecting fair elections, and even language encouraging violence from prominent leaders, including the president.”
