Richard Groves: Not only conservatives live in silos
"How are you doing?" I asked a friend at church last Sunday.
It was not my usual, "How are you doing?" greeting. What I really meant was, "How are you coping with the results of the election?"
He understood the question. "Fine," he said, "I think."
There's been a lot of that going on lately as Democrats and their non-MAGA fellow travelers struggle to get their bearings after the devastating victory of Donald Trump.
The postmortem is underway as pundits, political scientists and party leaders try to figure out "What the Harris campaign did wrong" (The Washington Post) or "What the Left always gets wrong" (The Atlantic).
My puzzle is different: why we were shocked that Trump won, why were we taken unaware by how sweeping his victory was.
I have a theory.
When we first began to grapple with political polarization, we decided that a silo was an apt image for the compartmentalizing of political and cultural views that was taking place.
We have retreated inside our ideological silos, we said, receiving news and information only from certain sources and talking just with people who think as we think and believe as we believe. There is little or no cross-pollination, no genuine clash of ideas.
That is our problem, we said.
We on the left did not apply the image equally. What we really meant was that they, the other side, the MAGA crowd, have holed themselves up in their silo, watching only Fox News, reading the New York Post, listening to conservative podcasts and talking only with each other.
What we failed to adequately appreciate is that we had holed up in our own silo, restricting our informational intake to CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other ideologically friendly sources.
Thus sequestered, we were unaware of a rightward shift in our political culture.
Did you know, for example, that according to the most recent New York Times/Sienna College survey, barely one-quarter of Americans self-identify as liberal, while almost 40% of Americans think of themselves as conservative?
On the day after the election, in the early morning hours, a team of New York Times researchers took on a daunting task: comparing the results of the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections in every one of approximately 3,000 counties. After eliminating roughly 500 counties because an insufficient number of ballots had been counted, researchers found that Donald Trump's margin declined from one election to the next in only 240 counties; it increased in 2,367 counties. Trump picked up votes from 2020 to 2024 even in counties that he lost.
That is how complete the "red shift," as the coast-to-coast Republican sweep is being called, was. Yet it came as a surprise to many if not most of us.
Did you know that according to the same New York Times/Sienna College survey, more Americans viewed Kamala Harris unfavorably than favorably (48% to 45%) and that just 38% of the respondents said they believed that Harris was "good for democracy"?
Did you know that a Scripps News/Ipsos survey found in September that the majority of Americans (54%) are in favor of the deportation of undocumented immigrants and that more Americans believed Trump would be better at dealing with the "border crisis" than Harris (44% to 34%)?
Is it surprising that so many people voted for the candidate who bragged that on day one he would institute the "greatest mass deportation" in American history? That is what they wanted.
As the election approached, observers on the left expressed increasing puzzlement about the state of the race.
"How the hell can Trump be running neck and neck with Harris?" asked Robert Reich.
"It is absolutely, completely, totally ridiculous that this election is even close," wrote Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post.
What happened on Election Day was unthinkable to many on the left. Literally. Our information streams were too narrow, our bandwidth too constricted.
If we can't knock gaping holes in our silos, we should at least open a few windows and a couple of doors.
