NYT: America's Least Polarized State

[LoveTrains]

The recent post about dems and repubs from rugbywife reminded me of this article I read last week that I meant to share with everyone. Of course I found it interesting because it's local to me, but it is an interesting analysis of what happens if you only have one party in the state house. I would argue that we would be much better served by a three or more party system, but what is happening right now is that we are having these very heated primary contests. Basically whoever wins the primary wins the seat because half the seats are unopposed by Repubs. 

www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/upshot/welcome-to-rhode-island-americas-least-polarized-state.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A8%22%7D&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1

Welcome to Rhode Island, America’s Least Polarized State

AUG. 14, 2014

Josh Barro


Wonder what Washington might look like if it were less polarized? Just look to Rhode Island. The political scientists Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty analyzed state legislative voting records from 1996 to 2013 and found Rhode Island had the least ideological difference between the typical Republican and Democratic lawmakers.



It’s common for Republican officials in heavily Democratic Northeastern states to be moderates. What makes Rhode Island stand out is the number of conservatives within its Democratic legislative supermajority. The median Democrat in Rhode Island was more conservative than in all but 13 state legislatures, scoring directly between Georgia and Indiana and far to the right of those in Connecticut or Massachusetts.



“Lots of Democrats here would be Republicans somewhere else, but they don’t feel they can win without a ‘D’ next to their name,” says Representative Brian Newberry, the minority leader of the six Republican members of the state’s 75-seat House of Representatives. Observers on the left agree. “In Rhode Island, the Democratic Party not only has a big tent, it has a circus tent,” says Robert Walsh, who leads the Rhode Island affiliate of the National Education Association.


The Democratic speaker of the State House of Representatives, Representative Nick Mattiello, is seen as closer to the interests of business than to those of labor. “Basically, he’s a Republican,” says Wendy Schiller, a professor of political science at Brown University. In 2010, Lincoln Chafee, a former Republican senator, ran for governor as an independent; because Democrats picked a fairly conservative nominee, Mr. Chafee was able to run to the left of both major party candidates and win.



“Certainly one reason Rhode Island scores so low for legislative polarization is that Republicans have been all but invisible for many, many years in our House and Senate,” Mr. Chafee told The Times. “Traditionally there has been more polarization among the factions of Democrats.” Mr. Chafee knows this well: He became a Democrat in 2013, then quit his campaign for re-election after finding a Democratic primary field already crowded with candidates from the center and the left.



In the last few years, Rhode Island’s Democrats have sharply cut public employee pension benefits and passed a law requiring photo identification to vote. But perhaps no issue has been as upside-down in Rhode Island as that of same-sex marriage. When Rhode Island finally legalized it in 2013, becoming the last New England state to do so, every Republican in the State Senate voted for marriage equality — all five of them. “We really put the Democratic Senate leadership in a tough position,” says Senator Dawson Hodgson, the chief Republican advocate for same-sex marriage in the Senate. The tough position was because Democratic leaders, including Senate President M. Teresa Paiva Weed, opposed marriage equality, and were seen to be blocking it even in the face of strong Republican support.



Lawmakers in both parties get unusual latitude from their party bases for deviation from party orthodoxy. Senator Hodgson is running unopposed for his party’s nomination for attorney general — a circumstance that is hard to imagine for a pro-gay-marriage Republican in most states. Meanwhile, the state’s Democratic Party continues to re-elect social conservatives and progressives, tax cutters and public employee union backers.



This kind of ideological scrambling — one might say incoherence — has made it possible for Republicans and Democrats to find common ground and work together. But does it actually lead to desirable public policy? Nobody I spoke with in Rhode Island seemed inclined to hold up their state as a model of consultative governance for the rest of the country.


“We are unique state with a unique governing culture – and I would submit, a uniquely bad governing culture,” says Senator Hodgson. Of course, it’s not unusual for a member of a permanent minority party to criticize his state’s governance. But Rhode Island is a notably poor fiscal and economic performer, and observers across the political spectrum tend to talk about Rhode Island as a state that has fallen behind its richer neighbors.



The unemployment rate in Rhode Island has been consistently higher than the national average since 2006 and is currently tied for the country’s highest, at 7.9 percent. It has some of the country’s biggest problems with underfunded public employee benefits, which have put one city, Central Falls, into bankruptcy and several others at risk of insolvency. Over the last several decades, it has fallen behind its neighbors in per-capita income. The resulting erosion of the state’s tax base has put it in the unenviable position of having both higher taxes and lower government spending per capita than Massachusetts.


Rhode Island’s largely Democratic legislature has worked with Republican governors for most of the last three decades, but they have struggled to find an effective economic development strategy. One of the top political issues in the state over the last three years has been a decision to provide a $75 million loan guarantee to a video game company, 38 Studios, which filed for bankruptcy protection, leaving the state on the hook to pay its bills. Former Gov. Don Carcieri, a Republican, advanced the guarantee as a high-tech job creation measure in 2010 with strong support from the Democratic legislature, but nearly everyone agrees it was a boneheaded move in retrospect. “Horribly foolish,” as Mr. Walsh puts it.



In most states, better ideological sorting of voters has drawn clearer distinctions between the parties and made it easier for voters to reward and punish policy choices in general elections. As in Rhode Island, the Democratic Party in Massachusetts once had a strong conservative streak. Ronald Reagan called Edward King, a governor of Massachusetts in the early 1980s, his “favorite Democratic governor.” But gradually conservatives left the party, and Massachusetts Democrats became uniformly liberal, like most Democratic parties in the Northeast. Mr. King lost a primary to Michael Dukakis in 1982 and became a Republican in 1985.



That shift may yet happen in Rhode Island. It’s held back in part because the state’s partisan divide is also a longstanding religious one: Over 100 years ago, Rhode Island’s Catholics lined up with the Democrats against a Republican party that was seen to defend the interests of Protestant business elites. Ms. Schiller of Brown says suspicion of Republicans has been “passed down through the generations” among Rhode Island’s Catholics, even when they hold conservative policy views. In America’s most Catholic state (54 percent, according to 2013 Gallup data), that’s a powerful enough force to keep the state’s Democratic party a big ideological tent, and Republicans on the ropes.



The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.



A version of this article appears in print on August 14, 2014, on page A3 of the New York edition with the headline: Welcome to Rhode Island, America’s Least Polarized State.

[rugbywife]

I am interested that the nytimes used the term 'boneheaded' in an article. The part about the same sex marriage politics was interesting too.

Thanks for tagging me, I learned something!

[tres3]

I had neighbors for a couple years here in TN that moved from TN... it was too liberal. They were natives (accent and all) but super religious... they thought they had moved to the holy land.