brilliant. >> i'm david shuster. insid"inside story" with ray suarez, no relation that we know of. and for more information you can always head to www.aljazeera.com. [♪ music ] >> maybe you've already been feeling that way, but now you've got data. a report that liberals and conservatives are moving further apart it's the inside story. >> hello, i'm ray suarez.

some want answers. the way people look at how congressional districts are map may have different answers. and others may have another set of earns. the share of republicans who call themselves consistently or mostly conservative has risen, and so has the percentage of democrats who have called themselves consistently mostly liberal. in both cases more than half. is that what you see when you look around, when you look at how politics works and doesn't. that's our focus this time. >> we believe we can seize the

future together. because we're not as divided as our politics suggest. we're not as cynical as pundits believe. we are greater than the individual sum of our ambitious, and we are more than a collection of red states and blue states. we will always be and forever be the united states of america. >> president obama used that line in 2004, and it campaign part of both campaigns. the actual governing, and the rhetoric is quite different. >> i want americans to pay attention where their lawmakers loyalty lie. more tax protection for millionaires or lower student loan bills for americans. this should be a no-brainer. >> the president continues to ignore laws.

he did it again with the release of these taliban leaders. >> partisan confrontation led to a government shut down. parties right and left have thinned the ranks of what they used to call moderates. erik caeric cantor was labeled too liberal. a new pole by the pew research center shows on the left and right were more divided than in 20 years. in 1995.

>> what does the middle look like? it's shrinking. in 1994 49% had mixed views. today it's 39%. it's important to point out it's still the largest group of americans there in the mixed middle, but remember it's the partisan who is are the most politically active. these numbers show our politics are getting more polarized and as a result nastier. 20 years ago 17% of republicans had unfavorable views of democrats. and 16% of democrats had u unfavorable views of republicans. those numbers are jumped to 43% and 39%. do redder reds and bluer blues threaten the well-being of the country?

the poll used that word threaten. more than one out of three republicans think so. more than one out of four democrats do, too. can the partisans and the applications they support come together to solve problems? the numbers point to why this is so tough. the majority of partisans believe their side should get the better end of the deal. it's the opposite of compromise. it's called gridlock. >> a country that's making it tough for make a deal. joining us for that conversation michael dimmick, the lead author of the new pew study. alan bromowiwiz. author. and political science at stanford university and author of "culture war, the myth of a

polarized america." we heard the president say, and the quote is our country is not as divided as our politics suggest. >> was i right? >> the majority of americans are not caught up in this kind of ideological, straight-line thinking. that's the view or the perspective of a minority of americans, but it is a growing minority, and a very vocal minority of the american public. when you layer on top of that the partisan antipathy, the us versus them mentality it creates these logjams that become problematic. >> one of the graphs in your study that was most striking set out the average republican and the average democrat and compared them to where most of the other party is, and now sizable, huge overwhelming majorities of the other part are

to one side of the average member of the other party. >> exactly. 94% of democrats are to the left of the typical republican and median. 92% of republicans to the right of the other party. to be sure democrats ought to be a little bit to the left of republicans to the right. that's nowhere near the separation we see in congress where it's 100%. but there is growing trend with less overlap of values between the two parties. >> has there been sizable increase, one that is statistically significant of the number of people who not only think they disagree with people on the other side, but actually assign thei bad faith, bad motives, treat them with antipathy, not that they're mistaken. >> that's hard to say because getting good measures that go back over time on that kind of concept is a little bit trickier, but what we're see

something this growing sense of distance between the parties, that people see the parties, or better said the people on one side see the other party as farther away from them. and so at that point they--their sense of trust and competence that the other party is going to act in good faith, that the other party isn't really so misguided that it pose as threat to the nation as we said in this survey question, and it becomes more powerful in your mind. >> professor, you've taken a look at the american people and come up with a very different conclusion. how do you get to your place? >> i think there is less difference than you might think. i think the pew report is a very fine report. it's a very good study of public opinion over the past two decades, but i think there is confusion about it. i think the title is wrong. it's not political polarization, it's political sorting in the united states, which is very

important. what i've pointed out if you think of polarization in political terms it has not change. moderates, independents are still out there. polarization in ideological terms have not changed since the 70's, moderate is still the major category. what has happened, and al has written about this as well, sorting. increasingly liberals are in the democratic party, and liberals in the republicalib, and conservatives in the republican party. the people on the consistent left are not extreme liberals. they're consistent liberals. the same thing on the right. the people in the center are not really the middle. they're people who are mixed of inconsistent attitudes. if you allow me to give an example, the index that under

lies these graphs is based on ten questions, like do you favor military strength or diplomacy? do you favor programs for the poor or not? most people don't feel 100% on one side or the other of those dichotomies. 65% military strength, 35% diplomacy. if every question were like that, i'm not going to be in the extreme liberal but consistent liberal even though i'm fairly moderate on those issues. in the news lately the right wing populist. this person may have extreme views, cut off all social programs, deport all immigrants, heavily tax. there is a tendency for people to look at these graphs and determine them to be extreme, center and extreme right when they're consistent liberals,

consistent conservatives, and people in the middle are mixed. >> with the larger number of people identified as independents in 21st century america was it inevitable that the republican and democratic party membership self identified would be more refined, more consistently committed to a certain set of party ideals? >> well, what we've actually seen is that the parties have been falling apart, and independents are actually split the same way democrats and republicans are split. one of the things that the pew report shows very clearly is that independent democrats think very similarly to other democrats, and independent republicans think very similarly to other republicans. when you include those independent leaners in with the partisan you're left with only

10% or less of the actual electorate who are truly independent, who have no preference for a party. so in fact, we've had analect rate today that is very strongly partisan, and the results of elections show that same thing. i would also like to somewhat take exception to a point that was made about growing consistency and extremism. i think that this increase in consistency over time is very significant politically, and, in fact, it's the same thing that we see in congress. the reason democrats and republicans in congress are pulling apart is because they're voting more consistently. now they get a lot of cues of how to vote, and voters will be asked survey questions don't. the consistency within the electorate is actually very significant, and it's precisely those consistent democrats and

consistent republicans or consistent conservatives and consistent liberal who is intensely dislike the other party. so this growing consistency is very closely related to this growing antipathy towards the opposing party, towards the opposing party's candidates, and even to some extent other americans who oppose th their party. >> we don't have 150 independent members of congress. you have one party or the other for the most part. we'll take a short break and when we come back we'll talk more about polarization, how it effects us how we vote, who we choose as friends and where we choose to live. that's the inside story. stay with us. choice for the news.

>> they're going to shift with the times. different advantages at different moments, but i don't see those debates ever going away. >> we're going to take a short break. when we come back we'll talk about how people choose to live and among whom they choose to live. this is inside story.

>> welcome back to inside story on al jazeera america. i'm ray suarez. we're talking about political polarization in the united states today, but the new poll we're discussing also examines how polarization impacts how we choose to live. if you're leaving a place like michigan and which is with us and looking for some place to go. you could go to california, you

can go to texas, and those are two very different choices. >> we're finding that people's preferences about their environments and neighborhoods really are very closely linked to their political thinking. it doesn't mean that they're choosing places explicitly because of the people they want to live with ideologically, but there are broader preferences are correlated with their politics. we ask people if you could choose would you like to live in a bigger house farther away from others, even if it meant that you had to drive to get to stores or schools. or would you tradeoff a smaller house in a neighborhood where you could walk all of those things. 75% of the consistent liberals say they want that walkable community. 75% of the consistent conservatives we've been talking about say they would prefer the tradeoff of the larger house even if it meant driving farther. the conservatives say they prefer to live in ruler areas and smalrural areas and small towns and liberals prefer to

live in cities and suburbs. this is not caused by their ideological, but it's associated with their ideology. >> when you talk to consistent partisans they prefer to live with people like themselves in a neighborhood mostly made up of people like themselves. what does that tell you? >> well, i think that's a reflection of their growing polarization that we see in american politics. you know, people prefer to talk to other people who agree with themselves. they prefer to watch media where they're going to get their views reinforced, and they go on social media and primarily especially if you're politically active they're going to interact mainly there with people who agree with themselves. that's not true of everyone. that's true mainly of people who are the most interested and politically active, but the result is that these die verging

views are getting reinforced, and makes it harder to bring people together. >> when i was looking at those numbers it also cured to me that it was such a luxury. that neighborhoods 50, 60, 70 years ago weren't shaped by being able to choose who your neighbors were. when i was a kid i lived where we could forward to live. and i in a borough, a county of ethnic ge ghettos. nobody was checking the party association before determining where they would move. >> i think evidence that says they are is weak. a couple of my colleagues say they have done a very nice study in which they asked the people in which they lived in.

they say they like to live with like-minded people. but when they studied moves, it was full of low crime rates, good schools, property rates, so forth. there are real factors that dominate the decision to actually move. >> but where people have moved has shifted the political access in the country. millions of people have moved to texas, arizona, florida, north carolina, have those places changed the people who moved in, or have the people moving in changed the politics of those places? >> both. i think there are studies showing that the influx of northerners in particular changed the political complexion of the south. but it's also, let's remember that there are other actors out there. strategic politician who is are changing their party's positions in order to take advantage of new possibilities.

we have to bear in mind there are two slides of the change of what is going on. it's what the parties and candidates are doing and what voters are doing. >> if it was all consideration, places that are affordable in creating jobs, i guess would attract a lot of people and maybe that would change their politics. >> there is no question that we're seeing growing geographic polarization in this country. we're seeing a divide in certain states, counties, districts that are dominated by one party and those dominated by another party. the percentage of states and congressional districts that are dominated by one party is much

greater today than it was 20 or 30 years ago, and that has very important consequences because it means that the senators and representatives and state legislatures who represent those districts have really no incentive to worry about the voters who support the other party. they dole exclusively with voters of their own party, and then the primary election becomes the most significant election. it's not the general election in most cases. >> so michael dimock, what are the take aways for republicans or democrats as they sit and read over your survey and look at the graphs. what can they think, conclude with the teens, the 20's, and beyond. >> it does look lick there is a trajectory of greater ideological thinking. we are a nation that has a lot more information access than we did in the past.

the ability to choose from a greater range of sources of information that may or may not reinforce our views. all of that combines into a society where i think the left and the right are more consistent in the ways they look at things and find less opportunity to meet in the middle. but it's really important to remember that the bulk of the country isn't there. the bulk of the country does offer this mix of views. >> good to talk to you all. thanks for joining me. this brings us to the end of this edition of inside story. thanks for being with us. in washington, i'm ray suarez. >> the court shot down a company that might have changed the way

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