I wonder to what extent this is driving polarisation. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it would take to be able to break bread with someone who was very right wing politically. I see a lot of right wing people who I have a lot of common ground with, if I recognise that the material conditions they’re living under are making them desperate for an alternative. Ofc, I’m not keen on the fact that many of them believe that people like me (queer, leftists at universities) are to blame for those material conditions, but I like to imagine a world where we could work on the same team against the things that are actually to blame.
I think the gerrymandering in the US probably makes it so that each party has less reason to court voters of the other side. I can imagine what it must feel like to be a republican in a super blue state — even if you do vote, it won’t matter, and then every choice the elected government makes would perpetuate this idea of the big bad “other”. I wonder how much this affects things though, given that the polarisation is driven by many complex factors