The Disunited States: How partisan politics is polarising the US

Lee Drutman was interviewed for an Al Jazeera documentary on partisanship in US politics.

Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America think tank, fears that growing doubts about the integrity of the electoral system could lead to violence in the US. "We have this 50/50 politics in which elections can really depend on a few thousand votes here or there," he says "And both sides have come to believe that the electoral system is not legitimate. On the Republican side it’s voter fraud, on the Democratic side it’s voter suppression. And when you see political violence across countries is usually around elections when there’s a sense that the elections were not legitimate."

Manipulating the boundaries of an electoral district to ensure it has a majority of voters favouring a party - what is known as gerrymandering - also fuels partisan distrust. Drutman points out: "Gerrymandering, which Republicans have been particularly aggressive at in the last decade, creates this sense that whatever the outcome somebody cheated."

In 2018, Republican candidates for Congress in North Carolina got 50.39 percent of the vote, but won 10 of the state’s 13 congressional seats. Last March, the US Supreme Court heard a case challenging Republican gerrymandering in the state. But in June, the court’s Republican-appointed majority ruled against the effort to rein in partisan gerrymandering.