The Big Sort by Bill Bishop Read Free Book Online

Gimpel, Nate Persily, Mark Brewer, and Eric Schickler all advised us on the proper way to count and compare votes. Alan Abramowitz, Diana Mutz, and Peter Francia shared their research and their time. Social psychologist Dave Myers helped me understand the dynamics of group polarization. John Musick at Bluer and Mike Cosper at Sojourn were thoughtful guides into the emerging church. Joe Cortright and Ethan Seltzer showed me the Portland, Oregon, economy, and Anina Bennett introduced me to the wonderful artists in that town's comic book community. The Reverend Marvin Horan welcomed a complete stranger and honestly and eloquently explained the 1974 textbook battle in Kanawha County, West Virginia. Robert Gipe and Joan Robinett showed me how deeply the OxyContin plague had tortured Harlan County, Kentucky. Paul Stekler was a supportive, knowledgeable, and constructive reader.
    That
The Big Sort
has been published at all is largely a matter of dumb luck. Tom Ashbrook of WBUR radio's
On Point
was kind enough to have me on his show in 2004. Anton Mueller, a Houghton Mifflin editor, was listening, and the next week he called with the suggestion that we turn our newspaper research into a book. Without his curiosity and willingness to take a chance, our explorations would have ended years ago. Thanks also to crack copy editors Barbara Jatkola and Beth Fuller.
    We have benefited from the generosity of strangers throughout. I met Yankelovich Partners' Walker Smith in 2003 and have been peppering him with questions since. He's always answered with the knowledge of a marketing expert and the soul of a democratic citizen. Mickey Edwards was an eager reader of our stories in the
Austin American-Statesman
and organized a conference at Princeton University on political polarization after reading our series. (We've received advice since that conference from Princeton's Fred Greenstein and Larry Bartels.) Similarly, Robert Wright took an interest in our research and introduced me to his agent, Rafe Sagalyn, who not only navigated the business end of this endeavor but also helped shape an idea into a book.
    Closer to home, this book is a celebration of a thirty-year adventure I've shared with Julie Ardery. We've done a lot together, but fundamental to my understanding of the Big Sort was our decision twenty-five years ago to buy a little newspaper in Smithville, Texas. Over several years of publishing the weekly in that wonderful town, the people there taught us how a decidedly unhomogeneous unit could exist as a community. We left Smithville a long time ago, but what we learned together there is a big part of this book. So, too, is Julie. She contributed her knowledge of social theory and her considerable skills as a writer. If this book is honest—and if you can understand what we are saying—it's due largely to her.

NOTES
    Introduction
    1. Unless otherwise noted, quotations in this book come from interviews conducted by the author.
    2. James G. Gimpel and Jason E. Schuknecht,
Patchwork Nation: Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics
(Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 27–28.
    3. Richard Florida,
The Rtse of the Creative Class
(New York: Basic Books, 2002).
    4. Excluding third-party candidates was a common suggestion of the political scientists with whom we consulted. Eric Schickler, University of California, Berkeley; Nathaniel Persily, University of Pennsylvania; and James Gimpel, University of Maryland, were essential in setting the ground rules for this study. We found that including third parties changed the statistical details but not the substance of our studies.
    5. Alaska votes by districts, which were not stable over this period, so the state was included as a whole.
    6. In this calculation, Cushing and Logan used the "segregation index." Cushing used several measures, which showed the same pattern of change. Berkeley's Eric Schickler recommended measuring the change in standard deviation,