84-309 · American Political Divides and Great Debates · Fall 2026
Polarization VI — A Threat to Democracy? Does polarization threaten American democracy? The voter as referee, why we stick with our side, trust in Washington since 1958, and ten warning signs of pernicious polarization, scored live from your phones. Polarization VII — Geographic Polarization The map, and the power in it. Landslide counties since 2000, all 164,000 precincts from 2024, Pittsburgh block by block, partisan segregation (Brown & Enos), and the 2025–26 mid-decade maps with 2024’s votes poured into the new lines. Polarization V — Race and Polarization Tesler 2012 and Mason, Wronski & Kane 2021. How racial attitudes are measured (answer the four questions yourself), how race sorted into party, and how it spilled into health care, a dog, and the presidency, rebuilt from the ANES and from Tesler’s own survey. Polarization IV — Negative Partisanship Abramowitz & Webster 2016 against Fiorina’s essay 5. Why straight-ticket voting and record independence rose together; and whether the white working class switched, or its conservatives just stopped being Democrats. Polarization III — Affective Polarization Iyengar et al. 2019, rebuilt from the ANES and carried past 2016. Drag the end year to see what the article could see; put your own two thermometer ratings on the national series. Polarization II — Sorting Mason 2015, and how she counts it. Answer the two survey questions and your own square is marked on every grid; drag the year slider from 1972 to 2024. Polarization I — Partisan and Ideological Fiorina against Abramowitz. Each of Fiorina’s four tests and both of Abramowitz’s, rebuilt from the ANES and carried to 2024 — including the two that do not go the way the reading implies. Bigger Than They Are What the parties are made of, what Americans think they are made of, and what our class guessed. Ahler & Sood 2018. The Parties in Our Heads Reading companion — every number with its source, the vocabulary, and questions for discussion. Guess the Parties The eight questions cold, scored against the truth, against this class, and against the national sample.