The Man Who Did the Math on America’s Partisan Divisions

Howard Rosenthal, a political scientist who died last week, had keen insights into the rise of Donald Trump, and he helped develop a formula to quantify roll-call votes in Congress and give them a partisan score.

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By Blake Hounshell

When Howard Rosenthal died last week, he left behind an important body of work that will live on well after he is forgotten.

Rosenthal, a political scientist with distinguished tenures at Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton University and New York University, was hardly a household name.

But as my colleague Sam Roberts pointed out in his obituary, Rosenthal was responsible for pioneering, data-driven scholarship on the growing polarization on Capitol Hill, and he provided key insights on what was driving those yawning partisan divisions.

As we begin the sprint to the November midterm elections, with blistering ads beginning to flood the airwaves, Rosenthal’s observations are as relevant as ever. Our divisions don’t seem to be going anywhere, and his early theories for the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism became defining explanations of our politically toxic and dangerously divisive era.

“Howard was the person who started pointing out that the median income of a white man in America hasn’t increased against inflation” since the late 1960s, said Samuel Popkin, a political scientist and sometime collaborator of Rosenthal’s at the University of California, San Diego. “Nobody wants to say that.”

In 2016, Rosenthal tried to explain the Trump phenomenon as the logical byproduct of those declining fortunes — while mincing no words about the racial component of Trump’s appeal.

Writing for The Monkey Cage, an academic blog at The Washington Post, he noted that the incomes of white men had been “virtually stagnant” since 1967. And since 1996, he wrote, “white men today are slightly worse off,” while incomes for white women and Black men and women made “modest progress” over the same period.

The result of these trends, he concluded, “may be a base of white men that is loyally Republican and increasingly attracted to populist appeals such as Trump’s.”

Rosenthal, as Roberts noted, also helped develop a wonky model that sought to quantify roll-call votes in Congress and give them a partisan score. It lives on as Vote View, a website that is now run by U.C.L.A.’s Department of Political Science and Social Science Computing. Whenever a commentator builds a chart showing the polarization of Congress, chances are they are using the system Rosenthal built with Kenneth Poole, another political scientist, who taught for many years at the University of Georgia and is now retired.

“He did pathbreaking work,” Poole said in an interview, as varied as advanced statistical modeling and game theory. The two men wrote 30 academic papers together and published them in major journals, Poole estimated, along with five books. “He was one of the most important scholars of the 21st century.”

An asterisk to the infighting

And yet — perhaps paradoxically — bipartisanship, as measured by laws passed by Congress, has had a bit of a resurgence.

What Rosenthal perhaps didn’t foresee — and who could blame him? — is that Congress has become “surprisingly productive” in recent years, as the Yale political scientist David Mayhew put it in an email, despite the widespread assumption that gridlock is the order of the day in Washington.

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