Outside the Beltway

Is Partisanship Merely a Proxy for Race?

Disentangling the two is challenging, if not impossible.

James Joyner · Saturday, May 2, 2026 · 5 comments

Writing in Slate, UC-Berkeley public policy professor Jake Grumback purports to explain “How Normie Pundits Paved the Way for the Supreme Court Voting Rights Disaster.” He makes some compelling points but is ultimately too reductionist. Indeed, the introductory paragraph gets there straight away:

For two decades, a certain kind of American political thinker has insisted they know the real problem. Authoritarianism, oligarchy, and racism were symptoms rather than causes. The true pathology was partisan polarization. The sorting of Americans into hostile camps. The collapse of bipartisan comity.

Nobody of any note has argued that polarization was the only problem, merely that it was making it impossible to govern.

We built serious institutions around this diagnosis. Duke opened its Polarization Lab. Princeton launched its Bridging Divides Initiative. No Labels raised tens of millions of dollars. Braver Angels held town halls. The Carnegie Foundation offered prestigious fellowships, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences convened a blue-ribbon commission. Ezra Klein’s bestselling book didn’t seek to answer why democracy is dying, but Why We’re Polarized. Today there are more conferences and fellowships devoted to “bridging divides” than there are functioning bridges between the parties.

Again: these are part and parcel of the same thing. Our system is explicitly designed to require compromise every step of the way. If there are no functioning bridges between the parties—and the parties are completely sorted—then our system breaks down.

So, for example, Klein’s book (written in 2019 and published just as the COVID pandemic was starting in January 2020) describes the situation thusly:

“The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.”

“A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis” (The New York Times Book Review), Why We’re Polarized reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.

America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.

Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis.

This rather clearly does not ignore racism as a causal factor. It’s just one factor among many.

Back to Grumback:

The Supreme Court just revealed where that project was leading. In Louisiana v. Callais, the court’s conservative majority held that when a legislative district is polarized along party lines, it cannot simultaneously be found to be polarized along racial lines under the Voting Rights Act. The consequence is devastating: In a country where over 90 percent of Black voters vote Democratic and over 60 percent of White voters vote Republican, any racially discriminatory map can now be laundered as merely a partisan one. The VRA’s protection against racial vote dilution has been nullified—using a conceptual weapon that liberals and moderates spent years building and lending prestige to.

But, put another way, 10 percent of Black voters are Republican, and 40 percent of White voters are Democrats. So, clearly, race isn’t the only sorting mechanism.

The ruling also rests on a methodological error that would earn a failing grade in a graduate statistics course. The court treats race and party as competing explanations, as if controlling for one neutralizes the other. But for millions of American voters, race explains party affiliation. The vast majority of Black Americans did not randomly sort into the Democratic Party. Already trending blue since the New Deal, they were pushed fully into the Democratic Party by Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act and Republicans’ Southern Strategy over the decades since. To “control for partisanship” when assessing racial gerrymandering is to erase the very mechanism through which racism travels. Consider the analogy of a court ruling that a company didn’t discriminate by gender in pay because, once you control for being a manager or executive—positions from which women were systematically excluded—the gap disappears. Or that if you exclude people with high blood pressure, then a high sodium diet appears to have no effect on your risk of stroke.

This is Grumback’s strongest point and, indeed, the one that makes the essay worth thinking about. Six decades beyond Jim Crow, anti-Black racism is no longer the central driving mechanism in American politics—even in the Deep South. Diluting the Black vote is not the main aim of Republican-led gerrymandering. But it’s certainly a guaranteed outcome if not a necessary mechanism to achieving the desired outcome of maximizing Republican advantage.

Race and partisanship are therefore inextricably linked. But they’re not one and the same.

The polarization nostalgists also badly misread the history they claim to be mourning. American politics has almost always been polarized by party. The exceptional era was that of the New Deal coalition of the mid-20^th century, when the staunchest segregationists and the most anti-racist politicians in the country coexisted within the same Democratic Party only by keeping civil rights off the agenda. To conclude that partisan divisions negate racial divisions would be to assume that even the Civil War had nothing to do with race.

Well no. Indeed, the primary reason Abraham Lincoln and the upstart Republican Party won the 1860 election was that the Democrats split into two factions over the issue of race and the remants of the old Whig Party formed the Constitutional Union party, creating a four-way race. Slavery and the fate of the Union was the central issue in the contest. But, of course, that means we didn’t have the partisan sorting that Klein and others have pointed to.

Polarization-obsessed liberals did not directly cause the Callais ruling. But they laid an intellectual foundation. When we spend years insisting that partisan division is the master pathology of American life, we delegitimized arguments about racism as divisive. We created a cultural climate in which conflating race and party seems like a sophisticated, noninflammatory intervention rather than an evasion. And we’ve handed five Supreme Court justices a respectable intellectual framework for a ruling that would otherwise look nakedly like what it is.

I’m considerably older than Grumback and can not remember a presidential election when race was not at least a tacit issue. And Democrats have explicitly made race—and racism—a central issue in their campaigns against Republicans and, especially, against Trump. Further, there have been multiple best-selling volumes attributing Republican electoral success to racist rhetoric and proclaiming that Democrats would emerge as a permanent majority party as older Whites die off and get replaced by Black and Hispanic voters. (In fairness, some Republicans were making that argument at least as early as 2012.)

Polarization is a description of political temperature. It tells you nothing about what is being fought over or who is being harmed. A democracy polarized between those who want to preserve multiracial voting rights and those who want to destroy them is not suffering from the same illness as one polarized between competing visions of the capital gains tax.

So, I fully agree with the second sentence here. I just disagree that “multiracial voting rights” is the primary driver of our polarization. Indeed, Grumback’s prize-winning book, Laboratories against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, seemingly agrees:

Jacob Grumbach argues that as Congress has become more gridlocked, national partisan and activist groups have shifted their sights to the state level, nationalizing state politics in the process and transforming state governments into the engines of American policymaking. He shows how this has had the ironic consequence of making policy more varied across the states as red and blue party coalitions implement increasingly distinct agendas in areas like health care, reproductive rights, and climate change. The consequences don’t stop there, however. Drawing on a wealth of new data on state policy, public opinion, money in politics, and democratic performance, Grumbach traces how national groups are using state governmental authority to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and erode the very foundations of democracy itself.

Required reading for this precarious moment in our politics, Laboratories against Democracy reveals how the pursuit of national partisan agendas at the state level has intensified the challenges facing American democracy, and asks whether today’s state governments are mitigating the political crises of our time—or accelerating them.

The book is based on his multiple prize-winning Berkeley PhD dissertation, and I’ll happily defer to his expertise on what’s happening at the state level, especially since it comports with my more casual observations. While I was somewhat slow to come around to the implications, I’ve been writing about “using state governmental authority to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and erode the very foundations of democracy itself” for at least fifteen years now.

But those things are happening precisely because the parties have become more polarized and sorted. And, as Grumbach notes, the divisions are about much more than race: “red and blue party coalitions implement increasingly distinct agendas in areas like health care, reproductive rights, and climate change.” That’s to say nothing of abortion, LGBTQ issues, the role of women in society, vaccines, masks, what should be taught in our public schools, and so many other issues. And, indeed, the culture wars at least temporarily moved a considerable number of Black and Hispanic men into the Trump camp.

The court absorbed decades of elite discourse that trained us to distrust racial explanations and reach for partisan ones instead, then took that discourse to its logical conclusion. If everything is partisan, nothing can be racial, and the law that Congress designed to specifically fight against racial discrimination can no longer operate within its legislative intent.

I fully agree with Grumbach that it’s impossible to fully disentangle race and partisanship in America. But it’s noteworthy that we’re seeing polarization and the rise of extreme populism and nativism across the West, including in places without our history of Black slavery and Jim Crow. So, while it’s right to reject “nothing can be racial,” it’s absurd to argue “everything is racial.’