Lesson Structure:
1. Begin the class by watching the chapter Divide [17 minutes]
2. Initial discussion on students reaction to the film (details below) [10 minutes]
3. Classroom activity: Three ways of understanding the Divide [15 minutes]
4. Assignment: Voting Here at Home [5 minutes]
Materials:
1. Worksheet 1.1 – Polling Data Illustrating the Divide
2. Worksheet 1.2 - Maps Illustrating the Divide
3. Worksheet 1.3 – Op-ed Article Illustrating the Divide
Initial Discussion: Reiterate the five commonly cited characteristics of the divide the first
chapter of the film explores:
1. Rural/Urban
2. Culture
3. Morality
4. Race
5. Class
Through a show of hands, have students vote on which characteristic of the divide they see as
most pronounced in their community. Have them explain and support their choice.
Through group discussion, explore the divide characteristic, which received the most
votes. Below are examples of possible discussion questions for two of characteristics: the
rural/urban divide and the class divide.
Rural/Urban: The debate over which party represents the interests of rural communities (‘the
Heartland’) and which party represents the interests of urban communities (‘the Coasts’).
o What does it mean to be the party of rural America? The party of urban America?
o Which area do the Republicans represent? Why?
o Which area do the Democrats represent? Why?
o Is there a general consensus? As an exercise, have students make the case why each
party could plausibly be paired with either urban or rural America.
Class: The debate over which party represents the interests of the Working Class (‘the party
of Main Street’) and which represents the interests of the Wealthy (‘the party of Wall Street’).
o What does it mean to be the party of Main Street? The party of Wall Street?
o Which street does the Republican Party represent? Why?
o Which street does the Democratic Party represent? Why?
o Is there a general consensus? As an exercise, have students make the case why each
party could plausibly be paired with either urban or rural America.
SPLIT: A DIVIDED AMERICA LESSON 1 – THE DIVIDE
Discussion Questions
o What do these charts tell you about the attitudes of each group? Where is the largest
difference between candidate preferences? Where is the least? Go as in-depth as
possible.
o What do they not tell you? [Hint: they don’t tell us the reason that people from a given
group prefer a given candidate. For example, if there’s a Protestant with a high school
education who lives in a rural area, which of those three reasons accounts for their
candidate preference? We can’t tell from the chart why they vote the way they do.]
o For each chart, what other information is necessary to understand what is really going
on? How could you dig deeper?
o Do the group voting patterns illustrated by the chart match those commonly portrayed in
the media? If not, where do the two images presented differ most radically? Why might
that be?
SPLIT: A DIVIDED AMERICA LESSON 1 – THE DIVIDE
VOTE BY INCOME
BUSH KERRY
Less Than $50,000 (45%) 44% 55%
$50,000 or More (55%) 56% 43%
VOTE BY RELIGION
BUSH KERRY
Protestant (54%) 59% 40%
Catholic (27%) 52% 47%
Jewish (3%) 25% 74%
Other (7%) 23% 74%
None (10%) 31% 67%
VOTE BY FREQUENCY OF
RELIGIOUS SERVICES BUSH KERRY
ATTENDANCE
More Than Weekly (16%) 64% 35%
Weekly (26%) 58% 41%
Monthly (14%) 50% 49%
A Few Times a Year (28%) 45% 54%
Never (15%) 36% 62%
SPLIT: A DIVIDED AMERICA LESSON 1 – THE DIVIDE
Discussion Questions
Votes by County
2004 Presidential Election
Purple America
2004 Presidential Election
SPLIT: A DIVIDED AMERICA LESSON 1 – THE DIVIDE
Discussion Questions
I've been writing about polarization a fair bit recently, and the more I look into it, the more I think I'll
just move to Tahiti. That's because the causes of polarization -- at least among elites -- have little to do
with passing arguments about the war, the Bush leadership style or the Clinton scandals. The causes
are deeper and structural.
To a large degree, polarization in America is a cultural consequence of the information age. This sort
of economy demands and encourages education, and an educated electorate is a polarized electorate.
In theory, of course, education is supposed to help us think independently, to weigh evidence and
make up our own minds. But that's not how it works in the real world. Highly educated people may
call themselves independents, but when it comes to voting they tend to pick a partisan side and stick
with it. College-educated voters are more likely than high-school-educated voters to vote for
candidates from the same party again and again.
That's because college-educated voters are more ideological. As the Emory political scientist Alan
Abramowitz has shown, a college-educated Democrat is likely to be more liberal than a high-school-
educated Democrat, and a college-educated Republican is likely to be more conservative than a high-
school-educated Republican. The more you crack the books, the more likely it is you'll shoot off to the
right or the left.
Once you've joined a side, the information age makes it easier for you to surround yourself with
people like yourself. And if there is one thing we have learned over the past generation, it's that we are
really into self-validation.
We don't only want radio programs and Web sites from members of our side -- we want to live near
people like ourselves. Information age workers aren't tied down to a mine, a port or a factory. They
have more opportunities to shop for a place to live, and they tend to cluster in places where people
share their cultural aesthetic and, as it turns out, political values. So every place becomes more like
itself, and the cultural divides between places become stark. The information age was supposed to
make distance dead, but because of clustering, geography becomes more important.
The political result is that Republican places become more Republican and Democratic places become
more Democratic. Between 1948 and 1976, most counties in the U.S. became more closely divided
between Republicans and Democrats. In 1976, Gerald Ford, a Republican, could win most of New
England and the entire Pacific coast, and he almost won New York.
But since then we've been segregating politically. As Bill Bishop of The Austin American-Statesman
has found, the number of counties where one party or another has a landslide majority has doubled
SPLIT: A DIVIDED AMERICA LESSON 1 – THE DIVIDE
over the past quarter-century. Whole regions are now solidly Democratic or Republican. Nearly three-
quarters of us, according to Bishop, live in counties that are becoming less competitive, and many of
us find ourselves living in places that are overwhelmingly liberal or overwhelmingly conservative.
When we find ourselves in such communities, our views shift even further in the dominant direction.
You get this self-reinforcement cycle going, which social scientists call ''group polarization.'' People
lose touch with others in opposing, now distant, camps. And millions of kids are raised in what
amount to political ghettoes.
It's pretty clear that nobody in this election campaign is going to talk much about any of this. This
election will apparently be decided on the question of whether it was worth it to go to war in Iraq.
That's sucking the air out of every other issue, and inducing the candidates to run orthodox,
unimaginative campaigns.
Still, it's worth thinking radically. An ambitious national service program would ameliorate the
situation. If you had a big but voluntary service program of the sort that Evan Bayh, a Democrat, and
John McCain, a Republican, proposed a couple of years ago, millions of young people would find
themselves living with different sorts of Americans and spending time in parts of the country they
might otherwise know nothing about.
It might even be worth monkeying with our primary system. The current primaries reward orthodox,
polarization-reinforcing candidates. Open, nonpartisan primaries might reward the unorthodox and
weaken the party bases. To do nothing is to surrender to a lifetime of ugliness.