What the Shutdown Revealed About the Economic Divides in U.S. Politics

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/10/what-senate-deal-reveals-about-economic-divides-us-politics/7268/




Last night, after weeks of the most literal government inaction, the Senate stepped in and brokered a deal to reopen the U.S. government and raise the debt ceiling. But despite the last-minute deal, the deeper fissures that produced the Republican standoff and the government shutdown are not going away any time soon. They reflect fundamental divides in America’s economic and political landscape that have only deepened over time.

Over the past few weeks, politicians and commentators – from President Obama to a whole host of news outlets – have referred to the shutdown as the work of a few Republicans holding Congress and the economy "hostage." One particularly striking map (immediately below) by Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker has circulated around the internet for the last few weeks. It charts the districts of the 79 members of Congress credited as the instigators of the shutdown crisis, after they signed a letter to House Speaker John Boehner this summer demanding action on "de-funding" the Affordable Care Act.



The geography of Tea Party conservatives is largely what you’d expect. Half are in the South, and a quarter are in the Midwest. Not a single one is in the Northeast or the along the Pacific coast. All voted for Romney over Obama. As Lizza points out, using data from Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, the average district in this "suicide caucus" was three-quarters white, compared to 63 percent white in the average House district.

To underscore how different the Tea Party base is, my colleague Charlotta Mellander at the Martin Prosperity Institute ran a simple correlation analysis looking at the share of a state’s congressional delegation that had signed the August letter to Boehner (and thereby made it into Lizza’s "suicide caucus&quot and key economic and demographic characteristics of the state. As usual, we point out that this is only a preliminary analysis, and that correlation does not equal causation. But a number of interesting patterns appear, in light of both the maps in this post and what others have written about these diehard anti-Obamacare Republicans in the past few weeks.