I've yet to read @ezraklein's summary of the political science/political psych research on polarization. My dissertation on mass polarization, which I threaded about yesterday, was never submitted for publication but will appear in the theory section of the academic version of my
forecasting work, so @ezraklein would not have had access to it & thus would have had to draw on the out-dated (and I argue methodologically-contingent) "the public is fine" argument, which both @AlanIAbramowitz & I sounding reject in our quantitative research. Like I said, the
time series is getting expanded in the updated version & the mass polarization continues to grow after 2012. It is imp to distinguish to between people and voters. Voters are polarized. The tuned out are not, but that is not really all that helpful as they don't vote. And this 
of the Democratic Party, which I was talking to @neeratanden about yesterday. As I showed in my 2020 survey, the modal ideology category in the R party is conservative. In the Ds it is moderate. Rs are also more responsive to partisan cues. cnu.edu/wasoncenter/su…
Its also great when someone writes up a commercial version of the often VERY dense political science research- much of which is now VERY complex statistical work. If you do read it though, I encourage you to follow the political scientist whose work he is summarizing. As to the
theory of a feedback loop for polarization, @ezraklein is dead on there- I proposed that exact same concept in my dissertation so I'm interested in reading his take on it.
