ARTICLE: "Vote Like Thy Neighbor: Why the American electorate is more politically polarized than ever," by William A. Galston and Pietro S. Nivola, New York Times Magazine, 11 May 2008, p. 12.

This, to me, sounds suspicious as causal analysis, but I'm not sure how to counter the argument, even as I suspect it's an oddity of the Boomers. But here it is: "In 1976, only 27 percent of voters lived in landslide counties where one candidate prevailed by 20 points or more. By 2004, 48 percent of voters lived in such counties." The Boomer age is a weird one, politically, marked, as expert Ron Brownstein argues in his book, The Second Civil War, by a deeply and closely divided electorate, meaning big differences between the parties, but they attract similar levels of popular support. So the Dems and Republicans are less willing and less able to compromise, yielding the Boomers' pathetic record as legislators. So if you accept the Brownstein argument, and I do, then this one by Galston and Nivola indicates that the Boomer age has resulted in a sort of political segregation: we naturally move to counties where we feel politically comfortable. I'm not willing to describe this phenomenon as a permanent hardening of the social arteries of our democracy. People move a lot in this day and age, so the whole thing may be gone in a couple of decades as the Boomers move into their old age. Or maybe not.