POLITICS
Polarization Makes Us Small
How partisanship shrinks our hearts and our future
It’s election season, and the yard signs have popped up all around me. If nothing else, they serve as a good distraction when I go running. I make it a game by keeping count of the Trump houses and the Harris houses, using that count to calculate the ideological lean of the neighborhood I’m passing through.
The yard signs are interesting to me. I live in Ohio, a state that is, according to Cook Political Report, a “solid Republican” state. That makes Texas (a “lean Republican” state) more likely to swing toward Kamala Harris than the state that used to be the “bellwether” of national politics. There is, according to the experts at least, no chance that Trump won’t win here.
So why are people displaying their presidential allegiances on their lawns if the winner in our state is already certain? Perhaps some people are hoping against hope that their Harris or Trump signs might persuade uncertain voters (maybe — political scientists have found that they make a small difference), or that they could affect down-ballot races (yard signs have a bigger effect when candidates are less well-known). It’s probably also the only thing a lot of people can think to do that might affect the election.
