The people most sure are the most wrong
In 2019 the research group More in Common asked Americans to guess what the other side actually believed. Democrats estimated that half of Republicans thought racism was over; Republicans estimated that half of Democrats wanted open borders with no enforcement. Both were wrong by about double. The detail that stung: the gap got wider with education and with news consumption. The people following politics most closely held the most cartoonish picture of their opponents.
That is the strange engine under the thing everyone agrees is getting worse. Americans now tell pollsters they would be more upset by a child marrying across party than across faith. They sort their zip codes, their dating profiles, and their pickup trucks into matching tribes. And then, in the same surveys, about two-thirds say they are exhausted by all of it and want it to stop. The exhausted majority is real. It is the one fact all four camps build on.
Four ways out
Walk into a red-blue workshop and you meet the bridge-builders, who think the problem is a misunderstanding that contact can repair. Stand instead at a primary ballot in a safe district, where a sliver of the most committed voters picks the winner, and you are where the structural reformers live: change the rules, not the hearts. The developmentalists watch party swallow religion, race, and geography into one mega-identity and conclude the fight was never really about policy. And the federalist realists ask the rudest question of all: why are 330 million people trying to agree on everything through one election every four years?
The cruxes sit one beneath the other. Is polarization a feeling you fix by correcting the perception gap, or a machine you fix by rebuilding the incentives? And under that: is the goal to make Americans agree more, or to build a country that works while they keep disagreeing? One question is about hearts, one about rules, one about whether agreement was ever the point.
Alaska is the closest thing to an answer being tested in public. In 2020 it threw out party primaries for a single open ballot and a ranked-choice runoff. Watch whether the temperature drops there. That is about as close to a controlled experiment as a democracy ever runs on itself.
Americans guess the other side is twice as extreme as it is — and the better-read you are, the more wrong you tend to be. Two-thirds are exhausted by it. The fight: fix that by changing hearts, changing the rules, or deciding less nationally at all?
Perspectives:
- Bridge-builders
- Structural reformers
- Developmentalists
- Federalist realists