"... the number of voters moving away from the two-party system shows that representatives from both parties aren’t representing the will of the people."

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Panel: Polarization in politics more pronounced now
By Aly Brown, April 24, 2014

If you think Congress is growing more polarized, you’re right, a University of Iowa educator said.

Cary Covington, UI associate professor of political science, hosted a public forum Thursday night at Old Brick called “Congress Divided…Really?!” The panel featured former U.S. Reps. Jim Leach and Greg Ganske, as well as two political consultants and the CEO of AKPD Message and Media, which spearheaded the Obama-Biden media campaigns.

“While polarization is a very pronounced trend today, it’s actually very common in our history,” Covington said.

Covington said increased polarization in Congress can be identified by three trends from the mid-19th century to today as party overlap disappears, the left and right move further from the middle, and the “emergence of a constant state of divided government,” in which the president and House and Senate are controlled by separate parties.

Although divided government was close to nonexistent in the United States before World War II, Covington said that since the Nixon election in 1968, divided government has become the norm.

Additionally, Covington said the polarization of Congress does not mirror ideological trends in the American electorate. According to a Gallup Poll tracking electorate identification from 1992 to 2014, the number of people who identify as moderate has gone down, while those who identify as independent have skyrocketed at an “unprecedented” rate, from about 20 percent to 42 percent.

“We the people are not politicizing ourselves the way members of Congress are,” he said.

Larry Grisolano, panelist, UI alumnus and CEO of AKPD Message and Media, said the number of voters moving away from the two-party system shows that representatives from both parties aren’t representing the will of the people.

“It’s fascinating, to me, when I see the contrast in the charts … between the way Congress is behaving and the attitude the voters hold,” he said. “It makes you wonder what in the world is going on with democracy.”

Grisolano said the division of Congress is partially because of a lack of steady representative turnover designed to occur in Congress, the changing landscape in information exchange, and the “dispersion” of the president’s power to deliver a majority message.

Jennifer Rossman, political consultant and former Senior Policy Advisor to Rick Santorum, said that to get anything done in the Senate, politicians must balance the three P’s: politics, policy and process.

Rossman said politics have “distorted” the other two, leading to a “breakdown in the regular order of process.”

Although bills still are being passed through Congress, such as the nationwide pharmaceutical “track and trace” system, recent newsmakers such as the fiscal cliffs, budget impasses and government shutdowns are occurring because of this breakdown, Rossman said.

“Polarization is really nothing new, especially in a two-party system, but in order to get things done it really does take leadership in order to get past that,” she said.
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