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at 2:30 eastern, live coverage when she starts here on c-span. also online at c-span.org, or on the new free mobile video app, c-span now. journal" continues. host: kyle kondik is back with us this morning, joining us to talk about a new effort to explore political polarization in the u.s. and how to bridge it. explain why and how you chose to undertake a study on this topic. guest: where i work is working with a new group that is concerned about, as we are, they divide in the country and at the deep amount of distrust between people who voted for donald trump and people who voted for john biden -- joe biden. we have been rolling out pieces of the study. we introduced the project last thursday. and one of the things that comes out is on certain policy

matters, a decent number, trump and biden voters are not far apart, it is the details of the infrastructure bill that passed the senate and is now kind of awaiting its feet in the house -- fate in the house, but most of it is things that are strongly supported by bothsides. -- by both sides. then you get to contentious proposals like tax increases, making community college free, and that is where you start to see differences on policy matters. and there is also extreme distrust in that. a big swath of voters do not trust those on the others. they think elected officials from the other side are a threat to the country. i do not think it is earth shattering to say that the country is divided. but i think that the depth of these findings has been kind of

alarming to some. and that is why we did the project, we want to expose these things and figure out ways for people to talk more effectively with host: host: each other. on measuring the division, when people say, we are more divided than we have ever been, are they right? guest: this is the first time we have done this actual poll, so i cannot say we did it 20 years ago and it said things were better. we also fought a civil war. so i think it always feels like things are worse now than they have ever been, but with that said my guess is if you did a poll 20 or 30 years ago, the difference would not be as stark. the country is ideologically sorted out. 30 years ago, you had more moderates in the democratic party, more liberals in the conservative party. i think that the electorate kind

of showed more willingness to cross over. now we are in a time where very few states have a senator from each party representing it in the senate. you only have 17 houses districts that voted for a party for president, one party for the house. there's not as much crossover in congress as there used to be. and it is reflected in these numbers, too, that the partisan camps are well divided and if they do not like each other. host: political polarization is the topic. republicans, 202-748-8001. it democrats, 202-748-8000. independents, 202-748-8002. this is kyle kondik. i should also note he's the author of "the long red thread."

i want to get to the booking a little bit, but returning to the findings on political polarization. a strong majority of trump voters see no difference between democrats and socialists. a majority of biden voters agree there is no real difference between republicans and fascists. that's one finding. 41% of biden voters agree that it is time to split the country into parts, red and blue states seceding from the union. does that worry you? guest: i think it is worrisome. i do not think it is that people will act on those actions, but if you are basically willing to say that we should split the country because it is so divided, which is an opinion you do see expressed from commentators, i do think it is illustrative of the divide, even though i do not think that that is something that will happen.

you have to remember, when the country fought a civil war, you had an obvious division between north and south, slave and non-slave states. yes, today you have red and blue states, but a lot of them are a mix where you have kind of big blue urban areas and red rural areas. how you would actually divide up a country, even if you wanted to, and i personally do not want to, how you would even do that, i do not know how it would work. host: coming back to the historical comparisons. in "the washington post," it's said it is fashionable to say that the u.s. is at its low point. and we are more divided, more deceived than ever before. our problems are too large and our leaders are too small for

their jobs. what the diagnosis gets wrong is the historical dimension. not much is happening now that has not happened before. the climate crisis appears more menacing than the nuclear holocaust of the kennedy years because it is in the foreground and the other has receded. the immigration crisis seems more urgent only because this one's reckoning feel robbed because it is happening to us, not because it is more painful than the lynchings or chattel slavery. guest: those are fair points. i will not guarantee to you that the situation is spelled out -- that's spelled out in this poll is worse than before. part of what happened, and i get into this in the book, is that over the course of many decades, the parties realign themselves

ideologically. they realign themselves geographically. and there was far less crossover than there used to be. i think that our political system, there's so many checks and balances, the filibuster in the senate, and all these stopping points in the system that i think requires some bipartisan cooperation to essentially get things done, unless one side has a gigantic majority. what's different now is we are in a time of small majorities in the house and senate, there are chokepoints in the system and we cannot get through them. that, the governing structure, seems worse, even if the other challenges we face, certainly america has a dark history with race, that you could argue is better now than it has been. but that there continues to be challenges, as the columnist noted. and immigration, of course, is a

long-standing push and pull in u.s. history, so i agree with that. but i wonder if the governing arrangement we have with a two-party system we have is equipped to deal with these challenges. i mean, again, i do not think that those are unfair points. host: on the book, "the long red thread, how democratic dominance gave way to republican advantage in u.s. house elections." republican advantage at a time when democrats are in control of the house. guest: that is a fair point. what i was trying to illustrate is you have this long time from the great depression through the republican revolution in 1994 , where democrats controlled the house. and now, since 1994, the

republicans, even though the democrats control the majority now, the republicans have controlled the majority for 20 out of 80 years and appear poised to win the house back in 2022. so, what the book traces is what changed in the house and what has transitioned the house from a time where the democrats would always win big majorities to one where it is not evenly balanced. host: it is almost like you have a crystal ball you are looking into. callers. richard, a democrat. caller: i want to talk about human nature. you go anywhere in the world, anytime, and you will find people who are very empathetic.

and they are the kind of people that would -- to somebody they do not even know. opposite, the sociopaths. they do not care about anybody. and i do not care where you are in that world, there is those groups of people. in the west, in the last century, when the poles divided, it ended up with the fascists and socialists. you found it in the 1930's. and you find it now, in europe and in the united states. that is where we are now, the socialist versus the fascist. host: again, what we talked about in the polling. guest: democrats will sometimes call republicans fascists, republicans will call the democrats socialists. there's some

and just lie about it. host: the issue of immigration again. . be it how many immigrants let into the country or what we you about illegal immigration, republicans are more likely to be concerned about the issue and favoring more restrictive on the issue. we can talk about history. this has been a dividing line between the parties. if you go back 150 years, even

though the parties were way different, democrats were also the party of more recent immigrants, republicans were the party of the established groups of americans who can trace their lineage back here longer and that was a push and pull. it sort of continues to be. a lot of people who voted for trump expressed more concern about illegal immigration, about immigrants coming into the country and affecting their livelihood in some way whether it be social safety net having to take care of more folks coming into the country, job situation, or what have you, so it does represent a dividing line. i also think it's an issue, immigration in general, it is not one that necessarily has easy answers because if you are going to have any restriction on immigration, if you are going to essentially prevent people from coming into the country, how

strongly do you enforce that, what do you do with folks already here? i'm not necessarily prescribing the solutions here. all i am saying is reasonable people can come to different conclusions as to what to do and immigration ends up being also a political headache for whoever the president is. i think biden has suffered in some ways because as trump was seen as maybe too hard on immigration and to aggressive in his comments, bind -- bided is -- biden is seen as too soft. there is this constant push and pull on it. these are difficult issues. host: 9:00 a.m. eastern, about a half-hour left with kyle. we have been talking about the series of polls you are working on, the project you are doing at the uva center for politics along with project home fire. you polled trump and biden voters. why not do the regular democrats and republicans? guest: there's going to be a lot

of crossover between people who identify as democrats, people identify as biden voters, and people who identify as republicans and trump voters. i think we wanted to set up 100% on one side and 100% on the other and avoid the folks who maybe voted third party or call themselves one party label but maybe vote a different way. there are still some of those folks in the country, particularly if you look at party registration in certain states, republicans in say like west virginia, they only recently overtook democrats in terms of part a registration -- party registration edge in that state and that is a state that voted for donald trump the majority the time. so if you ask about registration, there could be differences but fundamentally, we wanted to look at the attitudes of specifically biden voters and specifically of trump voters. host: somers point, new jersey. this is captain, an independent.

good morning. caller: good morning. i'm speaking to the situation of creating wealth offshore with american companies, which they have been doing for many years. my family was good at it. at the time, my father was the largest manufacturer of commercial refrigeration in the world, privately owned. his fortunes were made by setting up affiliates and distributorships but mostly joint manufacturers. host: i'll tell you what, it is a story that might have worked better in the previous segment when we were talking about dark money in the movement of money around the country. you have a comment on political polarization? that is what we are talking about now. caller: yes. i think it benefits some people to make people angry at each other. i think consequently some folks know how to increase their popularity in the polls by pitting people against each other. that is pretty much what has

happened. host: we will take the point. guest: i think it is a fair point. one of the things i think we are hopeful to do with this pollingd is to try to point out some of the messages that politicians can use that instead of may be intentionally trying to divide folks, we can maybe build bridges. in an ideal world, both parties have been incentivized to have those kinds of messages but unfortunately, as captain said, they are sometimes incentivized the other way in stoking division -- jen: friday. i don't have any additional information. . today's agreement shows how american leadership and diplomacy can advance the economic interest of american working families. a