Sabrina Tavernise and Nate Cohn

SCRANTON, Pa. — This hilly, green stretch of northeastern Pennsylvania is a critical front line in next year’s battle for control of the country. Donald Trump made huge gains among white working-class voters here, and Democrats want to win them back. Joe Biden, who was born here, can’t stop talking about it.

But just because Biden can’t stop talking about Scranton doesn’t mean everyone in Scranton is talking about Biden, the president, or politics at all. In three days of interviews here recently, many people said they were just scraping by and didn’t have a lot of patience for politics. Many said they didn’t follow the news and tried to stay out of political discussions, whether online or in person. National politics, they said, was practiced in a distant land by other people and had little effect on their lives. No one mentioned Biden.

“You have to have a lot less problems to worry about politics,” said Ali Ahmed, 26, sitting on his porch talking with his girlfriend about how to pay rent for September.

Americans are living through an unusual political moment. Their political institutions are the most divided they’ve been since the period after the Civil War, according to some political science research. But how divided are Americans themselves?

By some measures, around half of the population is either disengaged or has ideologically inconsistent views. Together, 54% of Americans either hold a roughly equal mix of conservative and liberal positions or say they don’t follow the news most of the time, according to an Upshot analysis of 2017 data from Pew Research.

People in this moderate middle are less ideologically rigid than their politically aroused compatriots. They may lean left or right or hold strong views about the president — 65% of these less engaged voters say they either strongly approve or disapprove of his performance. But they do not line up on every single issue with progressives or conservatives, and for many, politics is not part of their everyday lives. Many want to find compromise and shrink from the conflict that modern politics has come to mean.

“We are just not seeing the polarization among the masses that people imagine,” said Sam Abrams, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who surveyed a nationally representative sample of Americans with NORC at the University of Chicago last year. “People who watch MSNBC and Fox are a loud but small minority. They are not representative of most Americans.”

These Americans are easy to miss. They are less likely to post about politics on social media, and they may be less likely to cross paths with the politically engaged in person. Just 18% have a college degree, and 44% are nonwhite. Nearly half are under 40.

The deep divisions that do exist could still have serious consequences for democracy. Revolutions are typically staged by small slices of populations, and it takes even smaller ones to perpetrate political violence, like the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, last month. And in the age of social media, it takes only a few to maul the many.

“You can tell me that 70% of Americans don’t participate in the culture war, but it doesn’t really matter,” said Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University. “Events today are driven by small numbers that can shame and intimidate large numbers. Social media has changed the dynamic. Even if most Americans practice excellent fire safety habits, if a small minority is rewarded for throwing lit matches, we’re going to live in an age of arson.”

Even so, a singular focus on division risks misunderstanding American society.

Pivotal swing region

There are few places where Americans might have more reason to be engaged than Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, arguably the pivotal swing region of what could be the election’s most important battleground state. In 2016, Trump improved over Mitt Romney’s margin by a combined 24 points in Lackawanna County and neighboring Luzerne County. The two places had the second- and third-largest swings toward the president of any county with more than 100,000 voters. Trump’s net 55,000-vote surge here was enough to cover his 44,000-vote victory in Pennsylvania.

Yet in Lackawanna County last month, 12 of the 30 people interviewed described themselves as not engaged in politics at all. Ahmed says he occasionally sees news, like when a celebrity shares something on Instagram. Most recently it was “something about the Everglades being on fire.” But it fades quickly.

“You see it, then you go back to your own problems,” he said.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t vote. He went to the polls for Hillary Clinton in 2016, not because he liked her but because his grandmother and aunt pushed him to go.

Almost every measure of polarization suggests that a majority of the public has not succumbed to the growing animosity between the parties. According to Pew, the share of Americans on the more rigid, ideological edges of the electorate was about 26% in 2017.

Those in the middle are more ideologically flexible, like Shannon Cavalier, 43, a waitress from nearby Jermyn. She thinks of herself as a Democrat. But she likes that Trump is trying to do something about illegal immigration. Her best friend is a Republican. And she has great affection for her colleague, a cook, who despises Trump and likes to talk about it.

“I just laugh,” she said while clearing dishes. “He gets really worked up over things he can’t control.”

She said politics simply was not a part of her identity, like a sport she didn’t follow. She felt neither pride nor shame associated with it. She does not post about it on Facebook, nor talk about it with her friends. Her life, she said, was too full of other things. She was leaving to go buy dog food, do laundry, vacuum, take her boys to karate, make dinner, and feed the dogs, the turtles and the hamster.

“It’s just not part of my everyday thinking,” she said. Her daily priority, she said, was, “Do my kids have matching socks?”

Asked Monday about the current big story in the news — whistleblower accusations involving Trump and Ukraine — she said she hadn’t heard of it.

“Absolutely no idea,” she said on the phone after picking up her sons from the bus stop. “Get off that,” she said firmly to one of them.

When told it involved Biden, she said: “Oh, I vaguely saw something on TV with the two of them, but I don’t know what it’s about.”

‘No politics, sorry’

One of the most polarizing forces is Trump himself. Voter turnout last fall was the highest in a midterm election in decades. But many less political people said his presidency had turned them off. They’d had enough of listening to him and the howls in response. If he comes on TV, they change the channel.

“Honestly, I see Trump’s name and I just get disgusted,” said Courtney Cerep, a former nurse’s aide from Old Forge. “Half the time I don’t even read it. And I should read it. I should want to know what’s going on. But I’d rather just be in my own life and enjoy what I have, rather than be angry and up in everybody’s business.”

Like many people interviewed for this article, Cerep, who is 35, liked some things about Trump. But she found his language vulgar, and was tired of the cycle of insults and angry retorts.

“I see the good things he’s done, but he’s done a lot of messed-up things, too,” said Cerep, who was baby-sitting a friend’s children.

Ideologically, Cerep is eclectic. She said she voted for Barack Obama because he “was the type to roll up his sleeves with everybody and was not some Republican that’s going to sit there and say, ‘Pick that shovel up and do this.’ ”

But she also used to listen to Rush Limbaugh — a habit she’s dropped — and she doesn’t like that “they are taking all our monuments down in the South.”

Asking people to spell out their political preferences for a newspaper article often results in exasperation and disgust. Some walked away. Businesses have written rules against it.

“No politics, sorry,” said a worker at Rising Wave Tattoo on Adams Avenue. “The owner says we can’t talk about that with anyone.”

Cristina Kalpa, a paralegal in Scranton, used to love politics. She shared political jokes online and read the news on her phone. But in 2012, she decided not to vote in the election between Obama and Mitt Romney, and said so online.

“Two friends from college tore me apart,” said Kalpa, 31, as she ate her lunch across from the courthouse. They even sent her texts calling her a bad citizen, and saying “something had to be wrong with me,” she said. They never spoke again.

“A lot of people my age started to have this all-or-nothing view about people’s opinions,” she said.

Many people interviewed in Lackawanna County said they were not regular news consumers, but that might actually be a boon in one respect in today’s divided age. Those who are more politically engaged tend to have exaggerated views of their political opponents.

Michael McCorey, a dancer visiting from Philadelphia, said that for him, social media was news and that he looked at it a lot on his phone.

“He’s like Thanos in the Avengers, the evil guy who looks for stones that give him more power,” he said of Trump. “His supporters are just as small-minded as he is. They are OK with others’ suffering.”

Recent polling has found some darker impulses — an us-versus-them thinking reminiscent of populist movements where there has been a democratic breakdown. About 30% of partisans thought the other party was a threat to the nation’s well-being in 2014, according to Pew Research, and that number rose into the 40s in 2016. And between 5% and 15% endorse political violence or have no sympathy about harm to political opponents. In another poll, 18% of Democrats said they thought violence would be justified if the Republicans won the presidential election in 2020, and 14% of Republicans said the same (if Democrats won).

No one in Scranton said that. But the most politically engaged did express deep worries that the next election could be critical to their very survival. Sam Diana, a 54-year-old antiques dealer, was setting up a food booth at an Italian street fair. A picture of his father, who came to Pennsylvania from Italy after World War II, was displayed next to the cash register.

“Look, I’m not some crazy Republican,” he said. “I don’t have flags in my yard or hit you if you like Hillary. But if Trump doesn’t get it, it’s over. We’ll be pushed to the side. They’ll be letting people in and giving them everything. We’ll get squished against the wall.”

Did he feel divisions in his daily life?

“Yes,” he said. “I’d be afraid to wear a Trump hat. Someone would throw a bottle at me.”

But for every person feeling the fight, there was another who was shrinking from it.

“I like to not really know what’s going on,” said Danielle Pregmon, 32, a tattooed barber who was eating a pasta lunch in between clients. “I just never had an interest in it.”

This article originally appeared in

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Sabrina Tavernise and Nate Cohn

Articles written by the author

The America That Isn't Polarized