afloweroutofstone:

Kinda difficult to explain to young people interested in politics that much of what’s happening isn’t just “polarization,” it’s “sorting.” Polarization is when people’s positions move farther apart; sorting is when people’s positions are more coherently organized into different parties. Both have been happening, but there’s evidence to suggest the effects of sorting have actually been larger.

Up until about 15 years ago, it was very common to have liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats serving in congress, since in the 20th century our political parties represented regional-cultural divisions more than ideological ones. If you were a WASP in New England you voted for a Republican who supported labor unions, and if you were a Christian in the South you voted for a Democrat who opposed abortion. 

But as those old cultural divisions waned and the differences between the parties became increasingly ideological, liberal Republicans all moved to the Democratic Party, and conservative Democrats all moved to the Republican Party. This has been happening in large numbers ever since party realignment in the 1960′s, but it’s only been in the last two decades that resorting has gone so far as to make “liberal Republicans” and “conservative Democrats” practically extinct.

The good news is that this makes the party blocs more coherent, making it easier for low-information voters to choose between two parties rather than having to inspect every candidate. The bad news is that this makes congress less effective, as the cross-party alliances created by the old system helped to prevent our two-party system from producing the kind of gridlock we have now.

There’s unrest in the Oregon Democratic Party cause there’s a sense they’ve turned away from their timber country white working class roots to a Portland metro base that orients itself more nationally- than locally, and it’s interesting how that plays out

When I showed up the state House was even, but then +1D but a rural one would cross over on rural issues, now it’s +14, and primary candidates appeal to national lines of politics and not their role in a state coalition

Hero-governor-founder-of-modern Oregon Tom McCall was GOP, but really a 70s-newspaperman take on a pillar-of-the-community progressive type. Oregon was so white the establishment could co-opt any civil rights challenge comfortably and local politics didn’t realign, so that stuck around some, but no white-flight suburbs rose up to replace it.

There was some ‘70s-'90s religious upsurge translated into politics, but most local stories I hear about those churches come to “…so, that was pretty much a cult”. In 1992 the state Christianity-as-politics group pushed an antigay ballot measure and the successful effort to defeat it set up the political terrain and identity to follow.

So really, the only thing Republicans have stayed articulated with is the eastern resource-extraction (dryland farming, mining, ranching) drylands. So they’re not really positioned to take advantage of that.

What has been significant is timber money propping up a regional civil society structure, including mobilization as “Timber Unity”, this election might see the first steps to electoral power with centrist D Betsy Johnson resigning to run for governor as an independent, proclaiming herself “pro jobs and pro choice”. I do wonder if she wins (she might! the outgoing gov is an uninspiring elevated-Lt. Salem lifer, and so are both potential successors) she doesn’t rejoin the party on her terms. There’s a moderate caucus forming too.

So the issue is the state Ds have aligned with the national Ds in a way that misaligns them with their terrain, but in large part cause the state Rs have been too aligned with national R positioning to exploit it because national cleavages don’t map to useful state cleavages (because Oregon skipped a realignment, and it’s rural WWC tradition is town-in-the-woods workers, not scattered-homestead farmers). this is playing out as a weird inside-outside play instead of the traditional state party realignment