These ‘United’ States

Lucianne.com links to a Daily Mail (U.K.) article which does a poor job of explaining survey findings concerning respondent willingness or interest in the concept of regions of the U.S. seceding to become independent nations. The findings of the Bright Line Watch survey with respect to secession are disturbing enough without the DM confusing them. I’ll try to explain.

The pollsters divided the country into five hypothetical regional groups as follows:

Pacific: California, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, and Alaska 

Mountain: Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico 

South: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee 

Heartland: Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska 

Northeast: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia

You could argue with their methodology as they tried for geographical compactness rather than ideological homogeneity. For example, Alaska’s politics are more like those of the Mountain states whereas New Mexico and Colorado now tend to vote like the Pacific or Northeast states.

As in the previous survey, levels of expressed support for secession are arrestingly high, with 37% of respondents overall indicating willingness to secede. Within each region, the dominant partisan group is most supportive of secession. Republicans are most secessionist in the South and Mountain regions whereas it is Democrats on the West Coast and in the Northeast.

These patterns are consistent from our January/February survey, but the changes since then are troubling. Our previous survey was fielded just weeks after the January 6 uprising. By this summer, we anticipated, political tempers may have cooled — not necessarily as a result of any great reconciliation but perhaps from sheer exhaustion.

Yet rather than support for secession diminishing over the past six months, as we expected, it rose in every region and among nearly every partisan group. The jump is most dramatic where support was already highest (and has the greatest historical precedent) — among Republicans in the South, where secession support leapt from 50% in January/February to 66% in June.

If you are looking at trend lines, the trend is toward more, not less, polarization. More sense of political opponents as “the other” instead of as colleagues with whom we disagree. The same forces that took the U.K. out of the EU are pulling at the ties which bind these ‘United’ States together.