A Nation Divided Against Itself

This chapter discusses how partisanship framed political perceptions at the start of the 2020 election cycle. It details how Americans became so intensely polarized in the previous decades that they judged nearly every aspect of the political landscape through a partisan lens, from performance evaluations of the president to assessments of sociopolitical conditions. With such little open-mindedness, the presidential race centered more on mobilizing in-group members than persuading out-group identifiers. The distribution of partisans across the states gave both sides a reasonable chance to win the White House, galvanizing partisan elites to identify and facilitate the selection of the strongest possible nominee.