“Polarized by Degrees” with Matt Grossmann and Dave Hopkins

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 November 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A lot of things will really change over the course of this week, no matter the election outcome. And with that, we were thinking it would be good to share a conversation that would be illuminating regardless of what happens. Over the past few decades, American society has experienced seismic changes. One of the trends we have seen is a rightward shift towards the Republican Party among voters without a four-year college degree and a pro democratic center-left shift of voters who have a four-year college degree. There’s a lot to unpack about what has animated these changes. Matt Grossmann is the director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research and a professor of political science at Michigan State University. Dave Hopkins is a political scientist at Boston College. Grossmann and Hopkins are the co-authors of “Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics.” They join WITHpod to discuss the origin of these trends, the effects on both major parties and more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	There is always a large part of the American public and publics elsewhere that thinks
0:10.9	culture is moving too fast, that we should go back to the way things were or at least
0:16.5	slow the change.
0:17.6	And that's been enough to keep the Republican Party on the right globally quite
0:22.4	competitive. The diploma divide is obviously an electoral and a party story, but it's also really a story
0:28.7	about who do you think should be empowered to make policy and who should be given that role
0:34.6	in our government.
0:39.1	Hello, and welcome, why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
0:46.3	Well, if you were hearing my voice on the day, this comes out, it is indeed election day.
0:51.0	And as we thought about, well, what are we going to do on election day?
0:54.0	Because a lot of things
0:55.3	will really change over the course of today and tomorrow and Thursday and Friday, maybe it takes
1:00.9	longer to determine a winner. I thought about what we could do today, a conversation that would be
1:05.5	illuminating no matter the outcome. And this is in the context of something that sort of bothers
1:10.0	me about election analysis,
1:11.2	which is that it tends to focus so much on who won, which obviously is important, wildly
1:16.8	important for the country, for history, for what the government does. But as a sort of analytical
1:22.5	matter, whether a certain candidate got 49 or 51 percent of the vote, like as a sociological fact, is not actually that important or interesting, right?
1:31.6	Like, that's a rounding error.
1:32.9	It matters enormously for the course of the democracy.
1:36.4	But if you're talking about long-term trends of subgroups and demographics and stuff, the winning is almost beside the point, right?
1:43.0	It's the trends that are underneath the hood of the win and that are sort of moving over time that tell us something about the kind of more broad structural features of American democracy. So today we're going to talk about one of those. And I think it's arguably the most important. And I think no matter the outcome of this election, it will rear its head here. And that is the
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