As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles<\/strong> to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.<\/p>\n By <\/span>Blake Hounshell<\/span><\/p>\n When Howard Rosenthal died last week, he left behind an important body of work that will live on well after he is forgotten.<\/p>\n Rosenthal, a political scientist with distinguished tenures at Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton University and New York University, was hardly a household name.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n As we begin the sprint to the November midterm elections, with blistering ads beginning to flood the airwaves, Rosenthal\u2019s observations are as relevant as ever. Our divisions don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201cHoward was the person who started pointing out that the median income of a white man in America hasn\u2019t increased against inflation\u201d since the late 1960s, said Samuel Popkin, a political scientist and sometime collaborator of Rosenthal\u2019s at the University of California, San Diego. \u201cNobody wants to say that.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2016, Rosenthal tried to explain the Trump phenomenon as the logical byproduct of those declining fortunes \u2014\u00a0while mincing no words about the racial component of Trump\u2019s appeal.<\/p>\n Writing for The Monkey Cage, an academic blog at The Washington Post, he noted that the incomes of white men had been \u201cvirtually stagnant\u201d since 1967. And since 1996, he wrote, \u201cwhite men today are slightly worse off,\u201d while incomes for white women and Black men and women made \u201cmodest progress\u201d over the same period.<\/p>\n The result of these trends, he concluded, \u201cmay be a base of white men that is loyally Republican and increasingly attracted to populist appeals such as Trump\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cHe did pathbreaking work,\u201d 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. \u201cHe was one of the most important scholars of the 21st century.\u201d<\/p>\n And yet \u2014\u00a0perhaps paradoxically \u2014\u00a0bipartisanship, as measured by laws passed by Congress, has had a bit of a resurgence.<\/p>\n What Rosenthal perhaps didn\u2019t foresee \u2014\u00a0and who could blame him? \u2014 is that Congress has become \u201csurprisingly productive\u201d 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.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2022\/08\/31\/multimedia\/31OnPolitics-newsletter-pm-rosenthal\/31OnPolitics-newsletter-pm-rosenthal-articleLarge.jpg\")
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<\/p>\nAn asterisk to the infighting<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n