Here's how dramatically polarized the House has become since the 1950s


In his second term, President Dwight D. Eisenhower could expect fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives to vote in accordance with his agenda more than half the time. Remarkably, from a modern perspective, for a little while House Democrats were essentially on the same page.
In 2017, polarization in the House is higher than in any year since Eisenhower took office in 1953, as this graph from FiveThirtyEight shows:
In the era of President Trump, crossing the aisle in the House has apparently become near-unthinkable. That said, FiveThirtyEight warns against reading too much into this data, because the numbers for 2017 are "based on only 12 votes," and could moderate considerably as more votes are taken.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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