BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Politics of Resentment’ by Katherine J. Cramer

BOOK REVIEW: THE POLITICS OF RESENTMENT: RURAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN WISCONSIN AND THE RISE OF SCOTT WALKER

BY KATHERINE J CRAMER

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, PP. 256

Katherine J. Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment is the indispensable book to explain Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election. Cramer, a political ethnographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, performed a statewide survey of Wisconsin in 2007 and 2008, prior to the fractious recall attempt on Governor Scott Walker. Cramer’s field work suggests that the prominent divide, at least in Wisconsin, is between rural and urban residents. Rural folk, she gathers, view the world through the lens of place and class. Motivated by distinct values and lifestyles, as well as economic hardship, these people have a fundamentally distrustful view of government and the public sector.

Illuminating and eerily prophetic, Cramer’s findings provide greater insight into Trump’s success. Trump exceeded expectations among blue-collar working-class voters, and his performance in rural areas exceeded that of previous Republican nominees. Cramer, who interprets her findings within a strictly state setting, does not extrapolate her conclusions to divine a national mood. Rather, she finds that, at least in Wisconsin, rural voters exhibited resentment towards public officials, who they viewed as wasteful and unproductive, and aversion to elitism. This “rural consciousness,” Cramer writes, is also shaped by concerns of economic injustice. Rural folk were angered by the possibility that their tax dollars, funneled through a burgeoning bureaucratic apparatus, were not making their way back to rural areas.

Cramer identifies three overarching elements of rural consciousness: the belief, well-founded or not, that rural areas were getting ignored by decision makers in major metropolitan centers; that they were not receiving their fair share of public spending; and that urban lawmakers and public officials had no insight into the values and lifestyles of rural people. This rural-urban dichotomy features prominently in Cramer’s findings; in fact, she concludes that it has a more binding effect on voting preferences than political partisanship. Class and location matters, she argues, because it factors into the identities of rural voters.

Cramer’s methodology- going to local coffee spots and gathering places in randomly chosen towns across Wisconsin- is entirely novel. In fact, she argues- rightly- that this type of survey approach should be more common in opinion analyses of voters. “[P]oll-based analyses of opinion ought to be accompanied not just by focus groups or in-depth interviews by also by listening methods that expose us to the conversations and contexts of everyday life.” Perhaps this would have been a useful corrective for the presidential polls, which grossly underestimated Trump’s performance. “We would do well to acknowledge that sometimes there is no substitute for sitting down with people and listening to their perspectives in order to measure what those perspectives are,” she advises.

The Politics of Resentment is the indispensable, must-read study of how Trump, champion of the rural and working-class, captured the presidency. Cramer’s entirely novel field survey approach, which provides a closer and more personal window into voter sentiment than traditional polling, is a whiff of fresh air amidst the statistical noise of political polling. Her conclusions should be especially worrying to governmental fixtures and establishmentarians: rural voters, animated by class and geographical setting, resent the dismissive attitudes of political elites toward their economic and cultural conditions. While Cramer might have been better to elaborate on the national implications of her findings, her insights help those baffled by the meteoric success of President-elect Donald Trump.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Twilight of the Elites’ by Christopher Hayes

BOOK REVIEW: TWILIGHT OF THE ELITES

BY CHRISTOPHER HAYES

BROADWAY, PP. 292

As part of a series of reviews of books that explain the rise of President-elect Donald Trump, this next installment will be Christopher Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites, a sweeping social critique of the current state of political and civil inequality. Hayes, an MSNBC host and darling of the intellectual left, wrote the book in the upswing of the Occupy Wall Street protests and the Tea Party movement in 2012. His work provides critical context for the birth and development of those protests, and- rather unintentionally- for the success of Trump.

Hayes’ thesis is simple, one that has been replicated in many forms in recent years: America is becoming too divided. The elites who occupy the seats of power and influence are corrupting the country’s most cherished institutions. Out-of-touch powerholders, increasingly distant from the concerns of the hoi polloi, have brought about fraud, malfeasance, and attendant questions of their rightful authority. As elites have grown more insulated and unresponsive to popular pressures, Hayes argues that social structures have become more unequal, stratified, and top-heavy. “The cumulative effect of these scandals and failures,” he writes, “is an inescapable mood of exhaustion, frustration, and betrayal.”

But Hayes’ thesis extends to something more broad. He also argues, quite ambitiously, that meritocracy, the social system responsible for awarding power based on qualification, has caused the failure of institutions in large order. “Merit,” as he defines it, is nothing short of a misleading indicator of performance. In reality, meritocratic social structures can be hijacked by those who are best positioned to take advantage of its resources. This means that the wealthy and well-connected, as well as the genetic and socioeconomically gifted, are poised to rise within the ranks. This, the author argues, produces an increasingly insulated and self-perpetuating hierarchy of power and influence. Those who have been most adept at moving up the social ladder are also the ones most knowledgeable about pulling the ladder up behind them. The result is inequality and institutional compartmentalization.

To describe this phenomenon, Hayes has coined the phrase “Iron Law of Meritocracy,” which states that upward mobility becomes threatened as resources, preserved by an entrenched elite pathologically concerned with preserving its relative social cachet, mount at the very top. Those at the tip of the pyramid, self-obsessed with retaining their standing, are drawn closer inward, and further from everyone else. As a result, institutions become less accountable and more prone to spates of misconduct and malfeasance.

Hayes uses the examples of the agencies that caused the most recent financial crisis, as well as the sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church and the doping incident in major league baseball, to prove that authority is only sound when it responsive to those it looks after. Such were the flaws of Enron and Lehman Brothers, which cooked the books and shielded the public from their financial manipulations; the Catholic Church, which preferred to instead elevate the reputations of the priests instead of the concerns of the victims; and Major League Baseball, which downplayed the significance of player drug use during the infamous “steroids era.”

Hayes’ elucidation of the crises of authority that plague political and civic institutions can also be read with Trump’s indignant populism in mind. Just witness Hayes’ description of the disconnected masses, frustrated with their dwindling influence. These people, Hayes writes with stunning prescience,

feel that those with more power and access are getting away with things. Decades of deindustrialization and globalization have already squeezed and battered the poor and working classes… They share a sense that they are no longer in control, that some small, corrupt core of elites can launch an idiotic war, or bail out the banks, or mandate health insurance, and despite their relative privilege and education and money and social capital, there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.

Sound familiar?

It is these same discontents that have found a voice in Trump, who has aired a list of grievances against corrupt and incompetent political elites who have “rigged” the game against the public. Promising to “drain the swamp” of Washington’s most corrupted political class, Trump has pledged to rewrite the social compact to  reengage America’s highest offices of power with the masses.

Hayes is able to put his finger on the mounting pressures of popular discontent, but he was not able to appropriately anticipate how those many indignations could be expressed. In fact, he argues that such revolutionary activism and grassroots vigor could only be tapped for the sake of social progress. Thus, the end result, he argues, would be a wave of liberal revisions to the social contract: more redistribution, higher taxes, more leverage for the dispossed in the spheres of political power. Yet little could he have imagined of a self-described “blue-collar billionaire” and real estate mogul harnessing these same sentiments to run a campaign to restore America’s mythic past using regressive conservative dogma.

Twilight of the Elites is a tactful, ambitious, and unapologetic fusillade against political and civil inequality. He provides a lucid critique and analysis of social systems- their troubling dynamics and mounting dysfunction, betrayal, and stratification.  Hayes’ diagnosis is especially resonant in the wake of the Occupy protests, the Tea Party movement, and most recently in Donald Trump’s successful political bid. While both the Occupy protests and the Tea Party failed to have any lasting influence, only time will tell whether Trump’s crusade of swamp-draining will yield any meaningful changes to the social order.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ by J.D. Vance

BOOK REVIEW: HILLBILLY ELEGY

BY J.D. VANCE

HARPER, PP. 272

During the recent election cycle, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy has been the marquee work to explain the unanticipated political success of Donald Trump among working-class white voters. Vance offers a piercing cultural commentary on the decay of working-class livelihoods. In doing so, he embodies the poster child of conservatism’s wildest fantasies about personal responsibility and good old-fashioned bootstrapping.

What’s more, Vance believes that many of the material conditions which ail certain corners of the country are brought on by serial irresponsibility and poor choices. In this world of what Vance calls “truly irrational behavior,” addiction, profligacy, and fractured families cause the social fabric to fray. Individuals lose the hope and willpower to escape their circumstances. Vance compares this phenomenon to “learned helplessness,” or the one’s inability to recognize their personal agency. “There is a lack of agency here,” he writes, “a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.” Such sentiments were masterfully weaponized by Trump, who created a national theater for outrage at an unidentifiable adversary. The reasons for the decline of the working-class, he argued, were feckless government bureaucrats, hostile foreign countries, or a combination of both.

Vance, meanwhile, places blame not on an outside aggressor, but on communities, families, and individuals. He questions the whereabouts of stable families, who can provide their children with stable environments to learn. He criticizes the commitment of people to find and hold steady jobs, to know the importance of hard work, and to maintain good eating and exercise habits. Vance identifies a crisis of personal responsibility, one that transcends the sociological and goes deeper to its psychological, communal, and cultural roots. “The problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else,” he writes. “We created them, and only we can fix them.”

Vance’s work has been rightfully praised for its unintended prescience on Trump’s rise. It conveniently explains for the underlying discontents which catapulted Trump to victory. It contradicts Trump’s populist message in identifying the culprit of the cultural decline. Trump says its politicians and cunning global actors; Vance says it’s a matter of character and mores. Vance’s memoir, as much as he tries to distance himself from the fact, is a political work. Its message is unmistakable; removed of its folksy and down-to-earth prose, Hillbilly Elegy is an exemplar of conservative ideology, a reminder that conservatism’s most cherished principles have range and relevance.

The crisis of the polls

Harry Enten has another good piece over at FiveThirtyEight that cuts through some of the noise surrounding Donald Trump’s unexpected victory- and why the polls got him so wrong. Enten reasons that the so-called “shy Trumpers” theory, where voters were unwilling to reveal to pollsters their true political preferences because those views were considered socially undesirable, fails to explain the election results.

The first strike against the theory is that, if the theory was correct, Trump would have outperformed the polls more where the stigma against voting for him was greatest. That didn’t happen- in fact, Trump surpassed expectations by the greatest margins in deeply red states, where the stigma is predictably the lowest.

FiveThirtyEight

Other reasons why the shy Trumpers theory fails to pass muster include Republican down-ballot candidates outperforming their polls as well; Trump relatively poor performance among voters most likely to hide their support for his candidacy, namely those with a college education; and Trump’s own internal polling forecasts, which showed no indication of many shy voters.

By process of elimination, Enten finds that the polls underperformed for more conventional reasons, such as the level of support Trump received from his own party or pollsters’ underestimation of the Republican voting turnout. There’s another theory, one shared by Vox’s Matt Yglesias, is the decline in the amount of attention given to polling. Polling aggregation, which is what sites like FiveThirtyEight and the Upshot do, has in Yglesias’ view created a “serious tragedy of the commons problem”:

In the dark ages of, say, 2004, the convention was that New York Times articles would exclusively mention New York Times polls while the Washington Post would exclusively mention Washington Post polls. To spread costs, normally a print outlet would pair with a broadcast outlet (NBC/WSJ, NYT/CBS), but still the idea was to obtain proprietary poll information. Then local papers and TV stations would do the same thing for state polling. And public opinion research companies would also do some polls as loss leaders to advertise their commercial services.

Smart people realized that you could actually get a much more accurate picture of the race by aggregating all the polls together so that idiosyncratic methodologies or sampling error would wash out. Combine this with the way the internet broke down barriers between different media outlets and we got the golden age of poll aggregation in 2008 and 2012. The problem, as Henry Farrell foresaw four years ago, is that once the prestige and attention shifted to the aggregators, it undercut the economic rationale for doing the polls. Why go through the expense of conducting a poll to figure out if Clinton is up by 6 in Wisconsin or just up by 2 if you’re just going to become another data point in someone else’s well-trafficked model?

The retreat from quality polling might be a causal factor in why the polls got Trump so wrong. We spent less time conducting polls and more time quibbling over how those data points should be interpreted. Interpreted wrong they were.

Who’s the most hated person in Washington?

The bombshell in the latest Washington Post-ABC News Tracking Poll isn’t that a majority of voters doesn’t believe the FBI’s decision to review additional emails from Hillary Clinton less than two weeks before the election will make any difference in who they support. (In fact, personal scandals don’t seem to matter- a new Rasmussen Reports survey shows that 83% of voters said the Trump sexual harassment charges have not affected their vote). It also isn’t its projection of a tight race, with Clinton narrowly leading Donald Trump 46-45 percent. The most revealing piece is about someone who is not even running in this race.

When asked about House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s decision to not campaign with Trump during the final weeks of the election, two-thirds of Republican-leaning likely voters disapproved of the Speaker’s move (66 percent). Nearly half said they disapproved “strongly” (48 percent). Only one in five supported his decision.

Washington Post

After the “Access Hollywood” tape came out, Ryan was forced into an uncomfortable catch-22. As a major party official, he couldn’t withdraw his support for the presidential nominee of his party. But he also couldn’t be seen supporting someone who said very anti-presidential comments. He settled for the middle ground- which pleased nobody- by refusing to pull his endorsement, but not supporting him to the point of being seen at a rally with him. In the end, Ryan agitated the hard-right firebrands, who now want the Speaker out.

After the Trump phenomenon, Republican voters are less likely to want Ryan to represent the future of their party if Trump loses. Add on top of that Ryan’s sky-high unfavorability rating and you have a disaster in the making.

Barbarians at Washington’s gate

This year has been the year of party outsiders. Donald Trump, the real estate mogul and reality TV star turned presidential candidate, barnstormed the party by complete surprise. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist who only registered as a Democrat before the race, surpassed expectations by winning 23 primary contests. Both are clear indications that party boundaries are increasingly vulnerable to political invaders. It also shows the growing dissatisfaction with the two major parties- people don’t feel their priorities match very well with their own.

Research bears this out: According to a new PRRI survey, Americans are divided over the country’s future. Many do not feel satisfied with the current directions of the two major parties. “More than six in ten (61%) Americans say neither political party represents their views anymore, while fewer than four in ten (38%) disagree,” it writes. “Dissatisfaction with America’s two major parties has risen significantly since 1990, when fewer than half (48%) of Americans believed neither political party represented their views.”

This signals that both parties, but the Republican Party more likely, is bound for a shake-up. Cast in the ideological image of its intellectual figurehead Ronald Reagan, the Republican party has outlived its period of relevance. These weak points were masterfully exploited by Trump, who cunningly channeled voter dissatisfaction into a populist machine. As David Frum writes:

Trump saw that Republican voters are much less religious in behavior than they profess to pollsters. He saw that the social-insurance state has arrived to stay. He saw that Americans regard healthcare as a right, not a privilege. He saw that Republican voters had lost their optimism about their personal futures—and the future of their country. He saw that millions of ordinary people who do not deserve to be dismissed as bigots were sick of the happy talk and reality-denial that goes by thetoo generous label of “political correctness.” He saw that the immigration polices that might have worked for the mass-production economy of the 1910s don’t make sense in the 2010s. He saw that rank-and-file Republicans had become nearly as disgusted with the power of money in politics as rank-and-file Democrats long have been. He saw that Republican presidents are elected, when they are elected, by employees as well as entrepreneurs. He saw these things, and he was right to see them.

Meanwhile, Sanders appealed to young voters with strong appeals to hard-left agenda on income inequality, taxes, health care, and campaign finance. His stardom showed that some voters in the Democratic coalition care about moving the party to the left, rather than seizing an ideological middle ground. The Democratic Party platform eventually adopted some of his more liberal policy suggestions on issues like a $15 minimum wage and Wall Street reform. And recent polling suggests that many Democrats would want him to be the face of the party if Clinton isn’t elected.

Both parties are becoming increasingly outmoded and detached from the wider public. Perhaps a drastic shakeup is needed. Trump and Sanders are two steps in that direction.

Gary Johnson falls back to Earth

Harry Enten writes today in FiveThirtyEight that Gary Johnson’s polling numbers have dropped from just a few months ago, in line with the trajectories of other third-party candidates in recent history. Johnson went from 9 percent in national polls in August to just 6 percent now.

Generally, it is expected that support for third parties falls further into the campaign season. As these candidates fight over limited space to appeal to voters, they usually cannot sustain enough of a separate political agenda from the two major parties. As late American political historian Richard Hofstadter said about third-party candidates: “Third parties are like bees. Once they have stung, they die.”

Enten argues that Johnson’s standing in the polls took a hit from a combination of Johnson’s not qualifying for the debates and the dwindling in the number of “protest” voters frustrated with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. After the political conventions and the series of presidential debates- as well as Johnson’s hapless foreign policy blunders– it became clearer that the race would come down to a contest between just Trump and Clinton.

“Third party candidates usually don’t do very well, and the other thing is that their support tends to fade as the campaign goes along at the end,” says Jonathan Ladd, a Georgetown University political science professor. As Election Day nears, Ladd argues, voters are reminded of the reality of the two-party presidential contest.

Third-parties have a difficult time thriving in a political system where elections are decided by plurality voting, where a candidate who pulls in a plurality of votes wins. Political scientists call this Duverger’s Law, and it has been a stubborn impediment for third party bids like Johnson’s to collecting more votes in the Electoral College.

Historically, Johnson’s falling poll numbers compare well with previous third-party candidates. For example, Ross Perot stung early with a plan to eliminate the deficit and address unfavorable trade deals, and actually led both Bill Clinton and incumbent former President George H.W. Bush in the polls for several months prior to the conventions. But Perot’s number eventually dropped, and he didn’t even win a single state on Election Day. The New York Times has a nice visual showing how third parties have faded over time:

Third parties generally have impermanent momentum, eventually creeping to a halt by the time voters head to the polls. Johnson’s fall from a staggering 9 percent in national polls was inevitable given the laws of political dynamics.

The hacked WikiLeaks emails are revealing, but not in the ways you might think

If you have been keeping tabs on the news recently, you might have seen coverage of WikiLeaks’ latest attack on Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The group released 20,000 pages of hacked emails of Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta, revealing- to no surprise- the behind-the-scenes deliberations within the campaign over what to do about Clinton’s close ties to Wall Street, what policies she should endorse, and how to balance the interests of interest groups with high-minded policy ambitions.

While the email dump did not contain any “bombshells” that could put the Democratic nominee’s presidential bid into a tailspin, it does reveal something more interesting about the nature of party politics. Specifically, it shows the different political strategies of Democrats and Republicans, while also demonstrating how Clinton is following her party’s playbook to a tee.

Podesta’s show a campaign concerned about the “political” implications of policy choices. It uncovers how the needs and concerns of interest groups were attended to, while not giving off the appearance of lacking too much of a backbone. According to an excellent run-down of the email contents by Vox’s Jeff Stein, staffers in the Clinton campaign were mindful of how policy stances could adversely affect coalitions within the Democratic party.

For example, decisions on whether to support the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall bank bill or a carbon tax were weighed with an eye to keeping the progressive wing of the party in check. Union support was factored into Clinton’s position on the Affordable Care Act’s tax on employer health care plans, known in policy circles as the Cadillac tax. Clinton’s policy agenda was motivated as much by keeping the party’s needs satisfied, as going after loftier ambitions.

Given the ideological orientation of the Democratic party, Clinton’s nuanced policy stances are not surprising. As Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins write, the Democratic party- unlike the hardline and principled outlook of Republicans- cares more about the tedious assembly of political coalitions rather than maintaining a consistent ideology:

The Democratic Party, in contrast, has consistently maintained the character of a coalition of social groups more preoccupied with pragmatically seeking concrete benefits from government than with advancing a larger ideological cause. Disagreements among Democrats tend to divide the interests of one group or set of groups from another.

In previous decades, when the coalition included white Southerners and conservative Catholics as well as racial minorities and left-leaning intellectuals, forging compromise was a particularly difficult task for the Democratic leadership. Today, the constituent elements of the coalition are more mutually compatible in their policy preferences, although party leaders must still work to satisfy the policy priorities of each group without the ability to appeal to a common ideological commitment.

In other research, Grossmann and Hopkins suggest that the Democrat policy platform reflects its most active and participatory constituencies- such as labor unions, environmentalists, racial groups, and progressives. The result is a wish list of policy priorities. Clinton’s attending to the needs of individual pressure groups elaborates on her party’s political strategy.

Moreover, the authors also show that Democrats’ political networks are more dense than Republicans’. The former has larger coalitions, contingent upon the satisfaction of multiple groups, and a larger set of policy needs to represent. Republicans, meanwhile, have a select few policy goals that align with those of only a few interest groups.

The WikiLeaks emails show a Clinton campaign running a traditional Democrat Party playbook. It shows the differing incentives of policymaking, and the institutional differences between both political parties.

Young people don’t like Clinton- but will they vote for her?

It’s no secret that young people don’t like Hillary Clinton.

Millenials say she is wedded to establishment politics and maintains warm feelings for Wall Street and centers of power and influence. Clinton herself even admits in newly leaked speeches that she is “far removed” from the struggles of the middle class.

For a group that is highly distrustful of political and financial institutions, young people are not that eager to vote for the Democratic nominee. Many say they will instead vote for third-party bids.

Despite her unpopularity among the youth vote, Clinton may now have less cause for worry that third-parties will undermine her come Election Day.

A new report released by GenFoward (a partnership between the Black Youth Project and AP-NORC at the University of Chicago) finds third-party support among Millenials is inflated. Factoring in greater racial and ethnic diversity in their sample, the report suggests that candidates besides Clinton or Donald Trump will have “only a limited appeal to Millenials.”

Third-parties also face a complicating turnout problem. An electorate that sees zero returns on voting for a non-major party will be less likely to make an effort to show up and vote. As Matt Yglesias writes, Clinton might be in even stronger shape that the polls suggest:

[Third-parties] are starting, almost by definition, with a challenging base of supporters to turn out — people who feel disconnected from the political system and unserved by major political actors. On top of that, the fact that third-party campaign messages, by definition, can’t really be based around emphasizing the weighty moral stakes of the campaign or the profound civic obligation to play a constructive role in shaping the outcome. Last and by no means least, third-party campaigns don’t have party turnout operations behind them, down-ballot candidates shaking the trees for voters, or the visibility of a major campaign.

At the end of the day, if your main interest is in protesting the system, the passive protest of staying home is easier and perennially more popular than the active protest of showing up and voting third party.

So why does Clinton still have trouble courting young voters?

Context might be the answer. Young people, especially people of color, are less enthused about voting for Clinton relative to Barack Obama in 2012. Whereas Obama received approximately 91% of the young African American vote in 2012, Clinton only received 74% of likely African American voters. For Latino/a voters, Obama pulled in 74% compared to only 64% for Clinton. And 86% of Asian American voters turned out for Obama in 2012, up from just 71% likely to go for Clinton this year.

“Clinton’s current support among young voters appears to be lacking among young voters of color, who do not currently give Clinton the same level of support that they gave Barack Obama in 2012,” say the authors of the GenFoward report.

Clinton will still probably win the youth vote. Millenials overwhelmingly favor the Democratic agenda. They are more likely to support criminal justice reform, investments in education, and programs that reduce student debt. Among minority groups, Clinton is the preferred candidate for job creation, reducing income inequality, and increasing wages.

And with Trump as unfavorable as he is- only one in five Millenials plan to vote for him, according to the report- Clinton can expect to maintain a comfortable lead over him when it comes to young people.

But just don’t expect them to start liking her.

How politics might affect how you are treated at the doctor’s office

The researchers found that Democratic and Republican doctors similarly ranked issues relating to alcohol, obesity and helmet use. But they greatly differed on their responses to issues like abortion, firearms and marijuana use. Democratic doctors were more concerned when they were told a person with small children has multiple firearms, whereas Republican doctors rated stories about abortion and marijuana use as more serious.

Doctors also recommended different treatments. Republican doctors were more likely than Democrats to discuss the health risks of marijuana use and urge people to cut back. They were also more likely to discuss mental health effects from abortions and advise women not to have more. Democratic doctors were more likely to advise people to not store firearms at their home, while Republican doctors were more likely to ask people about safe storage for their weapons—not recommend they move them outside of the home.

“It is a little jarring to think that patients are going to get different kinds of care depending on the political worldview of their doctor,” says study author Eitan Hersh, an assistant professor of political science at Yale. “This [study] is not meant to embarrass anyone or any one party. We think this affects people at both sides of the aisle.”

These findings come from more than 20,000 primary care doctors, whose records were linked to a voter registration database showing the doctors’ political affiliations.

More here.