There’s gotta be a lot of people in the United States who aren’t really tuned into the political debates and don’t have strong feelings about them. :: That’s true… and actually, this is something that I spoke with Samara Klarr, one of the coauthors of that book I was talking about… she’s at the university of arizona… and she pointed out something that’s valuable to understand here which is that issue polarization—so huge divides between the two parties on certain different issues—actually isn’t all that big. I mean, there are cases where it’s large, but it’s not consistently large. But affective polarization, this idea of disliking the other party—that has gotten gigantic. In terms of… If you ask someone who’s independent but leans democratic what their opinion is of the Republican party… it’s extremely negative. Even if they identify as an independent. And so that polarization over partisan identity is driving a lot of the general negative partisanship that we see in Washington and around the country.
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lazy aphorist 
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