There's Only One 2020 Candidate Who Can Bridge The Great Divide-- And It's Neither Trump Nor Biden

As an Independent, Bernie is the one 2020 candidate who has been running a campaign appealing to Americans on both sides of the great economic divide that a new report from Brookings highlights and that John Harwood dug into for CNBC.com readers. "The partisan polarization of America’s economy is rapidly catching up to the polarization of its voting patterns," he wrote yesterday. "Republicans and Democrats have long since separated themselves by ideology, leaving each more uniformly conservative or liberal than ever. And now a new data analysis by the Brookings Institution documents just how fast their economic fortunes have diverged as well. That widening red-blue economic divide in turn drives the parties’ starkly different policy agendas. It helps explain why Democrats lavish more attention on education, technology and protecting immigrants, for example, while President Donald Trump and other Republicans place mining, manufacturing and border control on center stage."

“A series of genuine, penetrating shifts have been happening at warp speed through the last decade,” write Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton, both scholars at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “These shifts are massively altering the two parties’ economic identities.”

Drawn from Census and elections data, the Brookings analysis shows the extent of the change over the decade that began in 2008. Among the biggest shifts is the new geography of Congress, as Democrats offset losses in less densely-populated rural districts with gains in more densely-populated urban and suburban area.

The House Democratic majority, which represented 39% of the U.S. land area in 2008, now represents just 20%. The House Republican minority 80% of U.S. territory.

That coincides with a sharp increase in incomes and economic output for the constituencies Democrats represent in Congress. Today, the $61,000 median income of blue districts substantially exceeds the $53,000 median income of red ones, reversing the order from 2008.

The average gross domestic product for Democratic districts, near parity with Republican ones in 2008, has grown 50% higher. Output per worker has followed the same pattern.

Those shifts reflect trends within a globally-integrated economy that increasingly rewards better-educated workers and advanced technology. The share of professional and digital services jobs in Democratic districts more than doubles the share in Republican districts; a significantly higher proportion in blue areas now holds college degrees.

By contrast, Republican districts now boast the lion’s share of work in basic manufacturing, agriculture and mining. They also have a slightly higher proportion of residents age 65 or older-- 16.6%, compared to 14.7% in Democratic districts.

While red districts have remained demographically static, blue ones have grown more diverse. Roughly half of residents in Democratic districts are non-white, up by ten percentage points since 2008, compared to just over one-fourth in Republican areas.

Immigration patterns have produced a similar shift. The foreign-born population in Republican districts has fallen from 10.5% to 8.1%, while it has risen in Democratic districts from 15.4% to 20.1%.

Disentangling the political significance of economic influences from cultural ones is not easy. America began moving toward its current political alignment during the social upheaval of the 1960s, which included the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution and protests against the Vietnam War.

One legacy of that period, which left Republicans dominant among white voters while Democrats dominate among non-whites, is that racial resentments almost exclusively follow partisan lines. Those resentments promise to become more acute as America becomes a majority-minority country, which the Census says will happen by mid-century.

But now, the Brooking scholars say, “economic trends underlie the current party divide and reinforce it.”

“The two parties talk almost entirely past each other on the most important economic and social issues, like innovation, immigration and education, because they represent starkly separate and diverging worlds,” Muro and Whiton conclude. “Not only do the two parties adhere to starkly different views, but they inhabit increasingly different economies and environments.”

In their report, Muro and Whiton wrote that With their output surging as a result of the big-city tilt of the decade’s 'winner-take-most' economy, Democratic districts have seen their median household income soar in a decade-- from $54,000 in 2008 to $61,000 in 2018. By contrast, the income level in Republican districts began slightly higher in 2008, but then declined from $55,000 to $53,000. Underlying these changes have been eye-popping shifts in economic performance. Democratic-voting districts have seen their GDP per seat grow by a third since 2008, from $35.7 billion to $48.5 billion a seat, whereas Republican districts saw their output slightly decline from $33.2 billion to $32.6 billion... Democratic districts, for example, have grown significantly more dynamic in the last decade. Overall, 'blue' territories have seen their productivity climb from $118,000 per worker in 2008 to $139,000 in 2018 as recent demographic changes and electoral sorting ensured they became better educated and more urban. Republican-district productivity, by contrast, remains stuck at about $110,000, reflecting only slight improvements of bachelor’s degree attainment and Republicans’ increasingly non-metro domain. Relatedly, and equally striking, Democratic districts are rapidly increasing their dominance of the nation’s urban-tilting professional and digital services employment while ceding their historical, more rural shares of manufacturing and agriculture-mining activity. Just since 2008, Democratic districts’ share of professional and digital services employment surged from 63.7% to 71.1%, while their share of the nation’s manufacturing and extractive activities shrunk from 53.8% to 43.6% and 46.1% to 39.5%, respectively. Conversely, Republican districts-- failing as a group to gain traction in the new sectors-- have reverted to more 'traditional' ones. GOP districts’ professional and digital employment fell from 36.3% to 28.9% of the total in just 10 years, for example, while their shares of manufacturing and agriculture-mining increased from 46.2% to 56.4% and 53.9% to 60.5%, respectively." The guy who bridges the gap:

• Revitalizing rural America
• Housing for all
• jobs for all
• fair trade
• immigration reform
• veterans
• fair banking for all
• Medicare for All

Without getting into presidential politics, Muro and Whiton conclude that "perhaps there are possible meeting points. Maybe the urban, diverse, tech-oriented professional party and the exurban-rural party of older white males will find common cause on the 'future of work' at a time of spreading dislocation from automation and the spread of precarious work in offices as well as factories and warehouses. Perhaps Democrats worried about climate change and Republicans weary of storm damage in the Midwest and along the Gulf Coast will be able to work together on responses to extreme weather. And for that matter maybe the two camps will soon themselves become worried enough about today’s massive regional and economic disparities to engage. Or maybe not. It could be, instead, that the nation is only heading deeper into a period of continued stand-off, where economic change reinforces cultural backlash, and both gerrymandered districts and the Constitution’s allocation of two senators for every state prop up the political power of a declining fraction of the economy. If that’s how the politics of the decade’s changing economy are going to play out, then political analyst Ron Brownstein may be right that the nation may be heading deeper into an era of sustained turbulence that 'pits what America has been against what it is becoming.'" Only Bernie-- no one else-- is prepared to ameliorate this overwhelming nightmare. That's why I included that Bernie 2020 thermometer on the right.