American political debate defined by stark divisions

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No matter how you slice it, the United States is divided.

Last month's election was exceptionally close. The economic divide between rich and poor has grown so stark that it has become a major theme of American political debate. Then, just the other day, came a poll asking Americans to identify Barack Obama's greatest achievement and biggest failure as president. His health-care program won in both categories.

"We are a country divided right down the middle on every kind of social and political issue," said Steffan Schmidt, an Iowa State University political scientist.

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That is not a phenomenon whose importance is noted only in the faculty lounge, for it has great and grave implications for American politics for the remainder of the decade. When the new Senate convenes in less than two weeks, for example, the division between the two party caucuses – themselves nearly evenly divided after small Democratic pickups in the election – is so pronounced that some of president-elect Donald Trump's cabinet appointees may be in jeopardy.

"This country is severely divided, and divided in a way I haven't seen in my lifetime," Senator Angus King of Maine, one of only two independents in the Senate, said in an interview. "Both sides have an obligation to understand the depth of this divide and take steps to heal it."

Nations always have divisions; Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may have nearly twice as many MPs as the Conservatives possess in the House of Commons, but he's not without critics and crises, and the political view from Alberta never has had much in common with the vue politique in Quebec. But the divisions south of the 49th parallel have a new sharpness and vividness, one that worries political analysts and political professionals on both sides of the divide.

"We've got two nations packed into one," said Daniel Carpenter, director of social sciences at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

One of those nations is on the two coasts, the other in the Midwest. One is urban, the other rural. One sees Mr. Obama as a symbol of progressivism and racial reconciliation, the other sees him as a symbol of liberalism gone awry and the reason racial tensions seem sharper. One criticizes him for doing too little and being too weak, the other believes he has reached beyond precedent and the Constitution and is a near tyrant.

And one of those nations sees Mr. Trump as a national saviour while the other sees him as a threat to the country's traditional values – and that is the gap that may define American politics for some time.

"Usually after an election, particularly after a close election, the winning candidate takes steps to build bridges to the opposition," said Mr. King, the independent senator. "The president-elect doesn't seem to be doing anything to reach out to the millions who voted for everyone else."

That outreach customarily takes the form of conciliatory comments from the winner of the presidency, and then White House or cabinet appointments from the opposition party. John F. Kennedy's treasury secretary, for example, was C. Douglas Dillon, who had worked for the Republican presidential campaigns of Governor Thomas Dewey of New York and General Dwight Eisenhower. Mr. Obama appointed two Republicans to his original cabinet, Robert Gates as defence secretary and Ray LaHood as transportation secretary. And though Richard Nixon's treasury secretary, David Kennedy, was a Republican, he had been appointed to earlier government positions by two Democratic presidents, Mr. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

These yawning American divisions came into sharp relief in last month's election, when Mr. Trump won the White House by capturing the Electoral College while former secretary of state Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Take even a cursory look at the electoral map and you will see Democratic blue mainly on the coasts and Republican red pretty much everywhere else. Dig a little deeper and you will see Mr. Trump prevailing in rural areas and Ms. Clinton winning urban areas.

But that's only a part of the story. Add up the popular vote of the candidates who sat broadly on the left (Ms. Clinton and Green Party candidate Jill Stein) and compare that figure with the cumulative popular vote of the candidates broadly on the right (Mr. Trump, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, independent conservative Evan McMullen and Constitution Party candidate Darrell Castle) and you'll find that the conservative candidates took 50.4 per cent of the vote while the liberal candidates captured 49.6 per cent.

That margin (1,055,001 votes) is enough to affirm the notion that the United States is a center-right country, especially since, on a spectrum of Western nations, Ms. Clinton would sit on the right side of the liberal continuum. "The country is pretty much in the centre with a slight tilt to the right in a bunch of areas," said Paul Beck, an Ohio State University political scientist.

Even so, the American divisions are stark – and even more so in economic terms. Some 16 years ago, another Democratic candidate who won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote, vice-president Al Gore, prevailed in counties that accounted for slightly more than half the aggregate Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This year, Ms. Clinton won far fewer counties, but her areas accounted for nearly two-thirds of aggregate GDP.

"The stark political divide underscores the likelihood of the two parties talking entirely past each other on the most important issues of economic policy," wrote Mark Muro and Sifan Liu of the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think tank, adding: "Hashing out a serviceable politics and policy mix to serve that bifurcated reality is going to be a huge challenge."

The first challenge is likely to come on Obamacare, which Mr. Trump and the Republican Congress have vowed to replace – and poll results this month underline just how difficult politically that will be. Surveyors conducting the latest USAToday/Suffolk University Poll inquiring about Mr. Obama's legacy found a stunning divide. The rate of Americans who identified Mr. Obama's health-care initiative as his greatest achievement: 24 per cent. The rate identifying the initiative as his greatest failure: 27 per cent.