What’s Behind Those Red and Blue Maps?
The Social Geography of U.S. Polarization
April 6, 2021
In this episode of The Purple Principle, we wonder, what’s behind those red and blue maps of American political and social geography and our deepening urban-rural divide?
To find out, we consult not one but two political scientists named Ryan who have extensively researched the social geography of polarization in the U.S. – Ryan Enos of Harvard University (author of The Space Between Us) and Ryan Strickler of Colorado State (co-author of Demography, Politics and Partisan Polarization in the U.S. from 1828 to 2016).
We start with Dr. Enos on what led him to study the politics of place and what factors contribute most to the deepening of those blue and red map areas. The conversation quickly turns to social psychology, and Enos emphasizes the importance of neighbors and neighborhoods in shaping our political views. He also notes that polarized sorting now goes on within and between purely urban neighborhoods, with Republicans and Democrats straying apart from one another, even at close range.
Ryan Strickler of Colorado State emphasizes the dangers of these polarizing trends. He notes that much attention is devoted to the siloing effects of social media while the siloing of physical spaces, such as neighborhoods, is underappreciated. Strickler is concerned that the lack of social contact across ideological divides can be self-perpetuating, contributing to political gridlock and ultimately leads some to question our liberal democratic principles, even elections and the rule of law.
Is there hope for bridging this chasm? The Purple Principles throws out the possibility of mandatory empathy zones and bipartisan picnics with grape popsicles. But it’s likely that Dr. Enos’ recommendation for changes to housing policy to incentivize social mixing may be more substantive.
Tune into Season 2, Episode 3, “What’s Behind Those Red and Blue Maps?” for these other salient insights into the social and political polarization on our maps, across our cities, counties, and right down into our neighborhoods.
Original Music by Ryan Adair Rooney
Show Notes
Ryan Enos (2017). The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics. Cambridge University Press.
Transcript
Robert Pease (host)
Does that sound a bit like home to you? If so, chances are you and most of your neighbors think and vote quite a bit more blue than red. This is the Purple Principle. I’m Robert Pease.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
And I’m Emily Crocetti. But if days and nights around your place are quite a bit more peaceful...
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
Then chances are your neighborhood leans way more red than blue, and more so all the time.
Robert Pease (host)
We’re talking geography on this edition of the Purple Principle. But not the geography of mountains and rivers.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
We’re talking maps of people and neighborhoods and, unfortunately, of polarization. Meaning those beautiful deep blue and reds we see on America’s political maps are actually not so pretty when it comes to social dynamics.
Robert Pease (host)
The fundamental importance of social geography with not one but two political scientists named Ryan specializing in the politics of place: Ryan Strickler of Colorado State University, he’s co-author of the Demography, Politics and Partisan Polarization in the U.S. from 1828 to 2016.
Ryan Strickler
There's so many ways in our lives in which we silo ourselves. And a lot of times people think of like siloing, like information siloing. I think it's under-appreciated though, kind of the way we silo ourselves in our physical spaces.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
And Ryan Enos of Harvard University, author of the book The Space Between Us. His recent work in the journal Nature was featured on the front page of The New York Times.
Ryan Enos
As we started this conversation with, when people live separate from each other, but close, it really increases these feelings of animosity. And it seems like we have that going on between partisans even in neighborhoods.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
We start with Ryan Enos on a personal level with the question: what led him to study our partisan politics through the lens of geography?
Ryan Enos
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for asking. That's actually something I like to talk about. Before I became an academic I was actually a high school teacher. I moved out to Chicago to teach high school after graduating from college in California. And I was living there and living on the north side of Chicago and teaching on the south side of Chicago. And if you know anything about Chicago, it's a extremely segregated city where people are just so divided by race and other things like income. And it was moving across that city every day that I realized how much segregation and where people live, how much that shapes their life and how they think and what they think about other people. And it was my few years of experience doing that, that really made me decide that this was something really important to study.
Robert Pease (host)
It's interesting to us, here's an urban place that has the segregation, but it seems pretty consistently Democratic.
Ryan Enos
Yeah, it definitely is. And it is now, but one thing to say is of course urban places, weren't always that way. You know, it used to be, it wasn't so easy to predict where someplace was democratic or whether it was Republican based on whether it's urban or rural. But now density just predicts that like you wouldn't believe. And you know, all the people that live in the city of Chicago itself are very Democratic. As you move out, not that far, and this is what happens is that density goes down and the Chicago metro area, people become much more likely to vote Republican. And that's true in almost any city in the United States.
Robert Pease (host)
In the book, you spend some time elaborating on Allport's contact hypothesis, and we often have cited it as an important possible tool in reconciling polarized parties. But you say that Allport's hypothesis is not as simple as it sounds. It's not just contact, but the quality of contact. So could you, could you explain that for us?
Ryan Enos
Well, it's about, it's about the quality of contact in a number of different dimensions. So Allport would talk a lot about things like equality between groups, shared goals and things like that. And that's why originally, when he was talking about racial contact, a lot of the test places were things like the U.S. military, where people were brought together under a common identity and common goals. And it's not always obvious that that's going to exist when we talk about things like partisanship. The other thing that Allport talked about quite a bit, which people tend to overlook now, is he also said that when you put people in the same place, if they don't have real contact, if they're sort of segregated from each other, that that actually makes things worse. And so this is something else I focused on quite a bit in my research. When we're segregated by race, even if we're close together, or if we're segregated by party and we're close together, that actually in many ways makes things worse. The worst possible outcome is when you're close but far, is one way to put this.
Robert Pease (host)
You have provided these very striking visual studies of polarization on your website, which we do want to point our listeners to. How do you account for the effects of gerrymandering right now in legislatures all over the country? They're at it again, trying to figure out their advantage for the next election and create even more distinctly red and blue counties.
Ryan Enos
You know, gerrymandering, it's a very powerful force when it comes to shaping how legislators behave. You know, if you're only accountable to a certain type of person, then you're going to behave a certain way. It's going to take away the forces of moderation. And we can see this in these congressional districts as they change over time. One thing that's interesting to think about, which you may have come across on previous shows, is that gerrymandering can only explain so much of these problems of polarization we have, because even legislatures in places that can't be gerrymandered, for example, the U.S. Senate where no gerrymandering exists, these legislators are still pulling themselves apart. And so there's just a lot of other forces – as powerful as gerrymandering is – there's a lot of other forces that are going into this process.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
That is a great point from Ryan #1 there, Ryan Enos. Gerrymandering can’t explain polarization in the Senate as it does for the U.S. House and for state legislatures.
Robert Pease (host)
But maybe we need a quick refresher course on this thing called gerrymandering. A lot of listeners know the term, they know it has to do with the redrawing of districts.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
But the devil here is very much in the details. As we learned in our Season One episode with Trevor Potter, former Chair of the Federal Election Commission and now head of The Campaign Legal Center.
Trevor Potter:
Well, gerrymandering is a real problem because it means that whichever party is in power when the districts are drawn, which is every 10 years after our census, that party draws lines in a way that maximizes their number of seats. Now, in terms of polarization, it means that people are in districts that are safe for their party. So the only challenge they're going to get is in a party primary. And what tends to happen in both parties is that the energy comes from the base, who are the ones likely to vote in primaries. And generally they tend to be on the more extreme side of their party.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
So gerrymandering is a big polarizing force in our legislatures, and that does feed back into our neighborhoods.
Robert Pease (host)
Then, in turn our neighborhoods become even stronger forces for polarization, pulling people left in our cities, and to the right in our rural towns.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
When we first started researching this topic we thought it would be primarily about movement patterns across states. And that formed our initial questions.
Robert Pease (host)
But as any number of Ryans with PhDs will tell you, it actually has more to do with people staying in urban or rural places and conforming to the politics around them. Emily picks up the interview on that point.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
We were thinking that California is an interesting example politically, the way it has become more blue in recent decades. So we're wondering, has that shifted towards blue caused other shifts red or purple with Democrats and indies moving to California from wherever?
Ryan Enos
Well, the opposite process is going on as well, where people from California that were Republicans have sorted out, right? And of course we can overstate how much that goes on, because most people stay where they are. You know, most people in the United States are born in the state, they die in that state. Nevertheless, there is some sorting that goes on. In California, for example, a lot of people started moving out of the state in the 1980s and 90s. And perhaps people that were uncomfortable, we should say, with a certain level of diversity, that they accelerated moving out of that state. And so we see people moving out and we see that accompanied with things like demographic change, where the state has become more heavily Latino over time, and at least in the short term, California is going to be more Democratic. They're more likely it's going to shift, the state is going to shift the state blue. And so we've certainly seen that trend.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
It seems like every action has an equal and opposite reaction for that.
Ryan Enos
Well, there's something to be said for that. I mean, certainly, we might imagine a state like California, you know, as you mentioned, as it becomes more blue, it is possible that other places become more red and there's a lot that goes into that. But I'll tell you, it's fascinating. I grew up in California and I grew up in the Central Valley, which is sort of the farming part of California, and then I've lived in other places in the state, but it used to be that places in California were really kind of politically up for grabs. You had Republican governors for the longest time and it had Republican legislators and now you just can't imagine California like that. It is such a reliably blue state.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
Could you think of any more important or significant case studies or examples of states that have had significant movements either into or out of them?
Ryan Enos
Well, I I'll say again, you know, it's not entirely clear how much of the political shifts are due to movement. But we can see these places that do become more reliably one party or another over time. If you think of Texas, for example, which again, like California, it's hard to remember that Texas used to elect statewide Democrats and it doesn't now. If people think of changing, but at least in the last 30 years or so, it's been reliably statewide very Republican. And it's possible to believe that a lot of that is – maybe not a lot, but a portion let's say – of that has to do with people moving from California to Texas that brought those conservative values with them.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
So I'm very interested in the psychology part and it seems like that's a big factor. What is it about social isolation do you think that causes people to orient themselves towards conservative ideals and what is it about being around many people that seems to push people toward more progressive ideals?
Ryan Enos
Well, I wish we knew. There's a lot of things that are different between cities and more rural areas. And determining which one is causing this is really hard to do. I think that one of the next frontiers of understanding this urban-rural divide and the political consequences of it is understanding what exactly is causing that. There's some speculation that it could have to do with things that are correlated with political party. For example, it seems like liberals are more comfortable with uncertainty than conservatives are. They kind of don't mind that variation in their life. And if you think about living in a really dense place, the world sort of changes more quickly around you, if you will. And it could be those things line up to make liberals more comfortable in dense places.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
There were some news reports suggesting that people were more susceptible to believing in Trump's “stop the steal” campaign and his misinformation, because they personally didn't know anybody nearby who voted for Biden or did not see anybody in signs, etc. Do you think that geographic polarization is a threat to our elections and to our democracy as a whole?
Ryan Enos
Oh yeah, of course. It absolutely is. And the anecdote you gave, it's a hundred percent backed up by what we know about political communication and what we know about psychology. There's that old quip about, you know, how did Nixon win? I don't know anybody that voted for him. Which was said by some woman in Manhattan, if I remember correctly. And so that was 50 years ago now. And of course, in Manhattan in 1970, there were a lot of people that voted Republican. In Manhattan in 2020, almost nobody votes Republican. In this case, we're talking about a conspiracy theory that was put out in Republican areas, but it could be put out in Democratic areas. We learn a lot from our neighbors. And if the people around you all think the same way, it's really easy for misinformation and for threats to democracy to gain traction there and not to go away.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
If you had to highlight one factor that contributes to the social landscape that you think is really important to emphasize in terms of forming somebody's culture and politics, what factor would you highlight?
Ryan Enos
I think the one most important is just thinking about other people. So one thing we have evidence for, when it comes to political parties even, is when you're around people different than you, you tend to get away; now, not everybody can, of course. So a lot of people are sort of stuck in place, but if you're not, if you can't get away, you also often are likely to change. You adopt their attitudes. If you're, for example, a Democrat and you're surrounded by Republicans, eventually your probability of becoming a Republican kind of goes up and we can see this.
Robert Pease (host)
A lot to unpack there, Emily. Or possibly navigate, since we’re talking about maps. And especially maps with too much deep red and blue on them and not enough purple.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
Exactly. And these red and blue areas are continuing to get redder and bluer over time.
Robert Pease (host)
Which caught the eye of our second, Ryan, Ryan Strickler, early on. He’s originally from South Carolina but now teaching at Colorado State. We started this podcast a year ago with the question, how did we become so polarized?
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
But Ryan Strickler was over a decade ahead of us.
Ryan Strickler
I started my PhD in 2012. And kind of quickly, as I was thinking about what I want to study, what I want to focus on, polarization jumped out at me. And it's really interesting because at the time, 2012, it was really interesting. Why are we so polarized? Why are we splitting apart geographically and otherwise? And it seemed like an interesting question. And today it seems like the question, right? It seems like polarization has only ramped up precipitously in the last 8-10 years. My research is a little broader than just geography specifically. I have some work in partisan psychology and group psychology. I'm working on a project regarding political compromise now and partisanship, so I've kind of looked at and thought about and taught and studied polarization from different tacks.
Robert Pease (host)
You know, the red, blue and purplish map may be more helpful in general elections. It's not so helpful when you think about primaries. Should we be thinking more now about factions than we have in recent time?
Ryan Strickler
I think so. I think that's a very good point. And maybe that's the work for future research, kind of mapping geographies of factions within the party. I mean, I can't think of much work that has done that really, you know, gone beyond just the red versus blue. Given the fact that, you know, we have seen this urban-rural divide grow, and given the fact that between that and the House with gerrymandering and redistricting and the fact that there are fewer swing states, the fact that many general elections are not very competitive now in many areas in the United States. I think we should be paying more attention to these coalitions.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
So then I guess this is an overarching question, but I guess it can flow from that. In your view, what are some of the primary causes of political polarization today in the U.S.?
Ryan Strickler
That's a really good question. I think migration does play a role, like moving to a place that is more like-minded. As humans, we don't like cognitive dissonance. Evolutionary psychology tells us that. But I would say that migration and moving decisions are our secondary factor. Some of the political science terminology, like a geographic change, politically can occur because of migration; it can also occur because of conversion. You know, people changing in geography, changing how they vote, from Democrat to Republican or vice versa. People are interactive, become active voters and participants, vice versa, people that were active, maybe they become inactive. I would say it's more conversion than mobilization, you know, driving these kinds of stark geographic voting patterns that we see.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
Could you think of some examples to illustrate how these different factors work?
Ryan Strickler
Well, in our book, in talking about polarization in an historical lens, we look at two counties in particular. One is Pike County, Kentucky. In 1828 it was a strong Andrew Jackson stronghold, and today in 2016, 2020, is a strong Donald Trump stronghold. The second county is Hampshire County, Massachusetts. It's a strong John Quincy Adams county back in 1828 and also in 2016 a strong Hillary Clinton county and in 2020 a strong Joe Biden county. It's home to UMass Amherst, it's home to the five sister colleges, it's a highly educated area, a large percentage of people with college degrees. It's a more urban area versus Pike County, which is a very rural area. To the extent that so much of our partisan divide today is driven by urban and rural divides, driven by divisions and education, you see kind of an increasing diploma gap between the Democratic party and Republican party, and attitudes on race an increasing partisan divide in our country, perspectives on things like Black Lives Matter or the question of systemic racism, the need or not need to address it. Pike County being a predominantly white county, predominantly non-college educated county, increasingly over the past few decades, certainly past few years, it has gone towards the Republican party, versus Hampshire County, Massachusetts, highly educated, large percentage of people have college degrees, a more urban county, a more diverse county, increasingly going towards the Democratic party and increasingly darker and darker blue.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
Do you think it's location that attracts people already in certain parties to move or stay there? Or do you think that living in certain locations drives people toward a certain party to begin with?
Ryan Strickler
I think it's a little bit of both, honestly. I think maybe if I had to put my thumb on one side or the other, I think it's that certain types of people are attracted to certain types of localities.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
And then going off of that, we had a guest earlier named Abigail Marsh, she's a neuropsychologist at Georgetown who specializes in empathy and social interaction and social psychology. She kept mentioning the importance of the contact hypothesis and having contact with people who are different from you. It gives you more empathy and more understanding to have conversations. Do you think that we're losing that?
Ryan Strickler
I think we are losing that. I think that is a concern. There's so many ways in our lives in which we silo ourselves. A lot of times people think of siloing, like information siloing, lack of social contact is, as you mentioned, as regards the media, all of our media diets or our social media diets are like-minded enclaves. I think it's under-appreciated though, the way we silo ourselves in our physical spaces. If you walk around your neighborhood or you go to the store and you don't see anybody that has a Trump sticker on their car, and that's alien to you, or conversely, if you don't see anybody there that has a Biden sticker or a sticker about climate change on their car perhaps, or something like that, it extends the sense that your political opponent is not a political opponent, but an alien.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
Do you think that that has a serious threat of undermining our elections in our democracy and therefore our democracy because of those inabilities to empathize?
Ryan Strickler
I think that's one of the biggest challenges. So the biggest thing we need to get back, I guess, as a society is that sense of empathy. I'll look forward to listening to the podcast, because I'm really interested in this topic as well. Empathy is different from compromise. You don't have to even be open-minded to something, but just to understand why somebody would think in a different way. We have checks and balances and in order to get anything done, there has to be consensus. And without empathy, bargaining, consensus, compromise go out the window, and potentially people are more likely to say, these liberal democratic institutions, like rule of law and elections and things, what are they doing for us? And they're more willing to throw that kind of stuff out the window. Which is scary. I think geography plays into it too, geography as one of the factors, and the ways we silo ourselves certainly plays into it.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
So we started this episode thinking about maps, and the colors on those maps.
Robert Pease (host)
But what’s really important is the social psychology behind those deep red and deep blue areas.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
And the negative partisanship that results when many Americans literally do not know anyone from the other ideological camp. We learned the dangers of that way back in our early Season One interview with Abigail Marsh of Georgetown.
Abigail Marsh
There's an interesting phenomenon known as the outgroup homogeneity phenomenon, by which we tend to view members of out-groups as kind of abstractions. This is a topic I bring up in my classes sometimes: the fundamental tension between diversity and empathy, and I mean any kind of diversity. And I think that's what happens across the ideological divide. For somebody who hates Donald Trump, it is impossible for them to imagine the mind that would lead to loving Donald Trump. When that happens, you give up on coming up with an empathic portrait of the inner life of this other person and you just resort to stereotypes.
Robert Pease (host)
Still, we couldn’t help thinking, what could we do about these polarizing trends?
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
Should indie-minded citizens hold summer outings for red and blue Americans to bond over tug of war games and popsicles?
Robert Pease (host)
I dunno Emily. Tug of war can get tribal really fast. And you have to make sure those popsicles are all grape.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
You’re forgetting Rocket Pops. But hypothetically, due to climate change, or just the cost of living, would a large movement of say, 10% of Americans create some purple space on our maps?
Robert Pease (host)
And maybe also some civility and compromise in our politics? Let’s hear from Ryan Enos on that. Again, he’s the Ryan originally from California, now at Harvard University by way of that Chicago subway.
Ryan Enos
Can I dodge that question a little bit? I don't want to have the power to move people. I'll tell you something that I think would help with movement. And this is something that I think is often overlooked is how income and lifestyle choice and a lot of things increasingly correlate with party. In many ways, you could think of it as kind of natural that Democrats are living in cities and Republicans are living in rural areas, especially as wealth is concentrated increasingly among Democrats, and cities are hard to live in. And frankly, this is sort of the fault of liberals in places like I live like in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and other high-income cities where there's just not enough dense housing. And if you imagine that those cities were made more affordable, first of all, it would help like all heck with climate change, because it would cut down on the greenhouse emissions and all kinds of other things. If more people could live there, maybe more Republicans would choose to live there. Maybe more people would come back out from the suburbs and go there. And I think allowing those populations to move in many ways would be something that would help a lot with a lot of the problems we're talking about. You just give people more opportunity to mix and that mixing would help with polarization.
Robert Pease (host)
But I spent 10-15 years living in various Asian cities that just keep growing bigger and bigger. And one of the big factors there is the amount they invest in public transportation. You know, you can get to the center of Tokyo from a couple of hundred kilometers away on the bullet train very quickly. So do you think it's just a housing problem or could it also be an infrastructure problem because there's a big infrastructure discussion right now?
Ryan Enos
Yeah, sure. I mean, these things are all wrapped up. And unfortunately, one of the only things, when we talk about infrastructure in this country, a big portion of what we mean is actually road construction. Because for some reason, Democrats and Republicans, it’s one of the only things they can agree on. But what this means is that we don't have money for infrastructure, for things like trains. I mean, the high speed rail in California, we were talking about California a little while ago is, was canceled, right? They tried to build it from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It makes a ton of sense. It was going to pick people up in the cities in-between, and bring them to those big cities. And California couldn't make it happen. So think about how you are going to build high-speed rail in these other places, across state lines on the East coast, if one of the most liberal states in the country can't do it? And so it's vexing and it's caught up in a lot of different things about American culture and about American infrastructure and about American history that makes it hard to beat.
Robert Pease (host)
The average person, not necessarily following politics all the time, but tunes in on election night and sees this story of cities voting blue, rural districts voting red, the suburbs being this swing voters, is that too simplified a view of things, or in fact, is that pretty much how it is?
Ryan Enos
Well, I wouldn't call it too simplified because it's in many ways it’s largely accurate and it's become more accurate over time. But the thing I would say is that it misses a lot of variation. Cities can be big and if you look at, for example, if you opened up Los Angeles, you would see that you go to one part of the city and there's a lot of Republicans and you go to other parts of cities and there's a lot of Democrats. Now, Los Angeles is a big place, but even if you look within smaller cities, they don't have to be the big metropolises, you see the same thing. And one thing we've noticed in our research, and this is something that's surprised us, honestly, because we watch the same news reports as everybody else is. What we can see is that even within cities, you'll see that Democrats and Republicans separate from each other, they live in distinct places. And what's surprised us even more is if you go down to even smaller levels in those cities, if you go down to neighborhoods within the same city, you'll see the Democrats and Republicans tend to separate from each other a little bit, even within the same neighborhood, they don't live in the same places. And it's something that we think really demands an understanding of what's going on, because as we started this conversation, when people live separate from each other but close by, it really increases these feelings of animosity. And it seems like we have that going on between partisans even in neighborhoods.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
That was Ryan Enos, a political and social geographer at Harvard University. With help from Ryan Strickler of Colorado State, we pretty quickly learned that the reason we look at reds and blues on maps is to understand the psychology of our polarized nation .
Robert Pease (host)
In 2019, Ryan Strickler co-authored a book, Demography, Politics and Partisan Polarization in the U.S. from 1828 to 2016.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
In 2017, Ryan Enos published The Space Between Us from Cambridge Press, and he recently co-authored an article in the journal Nature highlighted by The New York Times, called “The Measurement of Partisan Sorting.”
Robert Pease (host)
Which has some very distinctly red and blue colored maps, right down to the neighborhood level. So forget the bicycle lanes and median strips, Emily. Independent Americans need to build empathy zones nationwide.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
Good luck slipping that into the infrastructure bill.
Robert Pease (host)
We’ll keep you posted on that effort, as well as the social geography trends over time. But next time on The Purple Principle, we’ll focus on gridlock in our nations’ capital and the longstanding and long-winded Senate tool against majority party dominance, the filibuster.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
The filibuster means that most legislation in the U.S. Senate requires not 51 out of 100 but in fact 60 votes to pass. We’ll hear from former Senate Chief of Staff Adam Jentleson why he thinks the filibuster must be done away with in our partisan time, like right away.
Adam Jentleson
This was a very centrist, moderate policy, and many would argue something that didn't even go far enough to address the massacre of 20 first graders with an assault rifle in their classroom. And it failed in the Senate on a filibuster, but not the kind of filibuster that people think of. There was no Jimmy Stewart moment. There was no great speech on the Senate floor. The bill's opponents simply were able to use the modern version of the filibuster to silently raise the threshold for passing this bill.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
But we’ll also hear from Richard Arenberg on why removing the filibuster might be like losing the keys to the bulldozer.
Richard Arenberg
It's a very shortsighted position to take, to eliminate the filibuster, to get the things done that you want done on your agenda. Because if there's one thing we know about the United States Senate, is it won't be in the control of one party or the other for all that long. And that day of reckoning will come.
Robert Pease (host)
Join us for our refreshingly short filibuster Episode and read more about the tricky politics of this issue in our latest edition of the Purple Principle in Print. You can find that on our website, purpleprinciple.com. Please also like and share us on social media and review us on Apple Music. This has been Emily Crocetti and Robert Pease for the Purple Principle team. Alison Byrne, Producer; Kevin A. Kline, Audio Engineer; Emily Holloway, Research and Outreach; Dom Scarlett, Research Associate. Original music composed and created by our third Ryan today, although he’s Ryan #1 with guitar or keyboard, Ryan Adair Rooney.
