Passions are running high in the race to become the 45th President of the United States. “Believe in love,” were the words spelt out by the crowd during the half-time show at the fiftieth SuperBowl. But when it comes to politics, Americans from one side of the spectrum feel very little love for the other. They’re into very different ‘types’ of presidential candidate, and it’s not just a phase. In fact, they’ve been gradually heading their separate ways for decades. They’re polarised between increasingly liberal liberals and increasingly conservative conservatives. And even within each side of the spectrum, there’s not a whole lot of affection between voters and their candidates.

Things are coming to a head in 2016, but don’t count on a happy ending anytime soon. Whoever America elects as its next President, his or her work will be cut out.

 

Crazy little thing called Trump

On the Republican side, it’s less of a love triangle and more of a hexagon of conflicting emotions. Mostly angry emotions. Republicans don’t like where the country is heading and are suspicious of ‘establishment’ politicians who say they can make it better – even if an ‘establishment’ candidate has a better chance of winning in November’s general election.

In New Hampshire, just 12% of Republican voters prioritised a candidate’s electability when casting their ballot. Twice as many preferred a candidate who ‘tells it like it is’. Of these, 66% backed Donald Trump. A few months ago analysts were sceptical that his support came from anything other than a relatively narrow constituency of frustrated voters and non-voters. In reality, the exit polls show that his support spans age groups, gender, income groups, levels of education and levels of conservatism. What unites them is a belief that this politically incorrect candidate genuinely offers an answer to their frustrations.

However, there are plenty of Republicans who aren’t backing Trump. Even among Trump voters in New Hampshire, just as many said they had reservations about him as said they strongly supported him. He won with 35% of the vote, with the remaining 65% of the votes split between ‘establishment’ candidates like Governors Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Chris Christie and Senator Marco Rubio, and the hardline candidate Ted Cruz.

But make no mistake: the remaining ‘establishment’ candidates in the race aren’t fluffy moderates. Last night’s debate in South Carolina underscored the reality that no Republican candidate is in the mood for compromise – or, at least, they don’t think that they would be in the race much longer if they were. With the death of conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, it falls to the sitting president to nominate his successor. An effective moderate candidate would have both defended the President’s constitutional right to do so, and urge Republicans in the Senate to work with the President to find a mutually acceptable nominee. That is what the Constitution demands, after all. Jeb Bush made the former argument, but didn’t have the courage to encourage the latter.

That’s a sign of the 2016 race. Regardless of whether or not Trump is the Republican nominee, no candidate is doing much to impress moderates in the centre-ground. Voters in the political centre always play hard-to-get, but this time round the Republican contenders aren’t following any conventional pick-up advice.

 

Can you feel the Bern tonight?

Over on the Democratic side, the race may be somewhat less chaotic but it’s still a very different kind of race to the one fought between Clinton and Obama eight years ago. In 2008 the then Senator Obama won (very narrowly) against the then Senator Clinton despite his relative liberalism. Now, Bernie Sanders is giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money precisely because he is further to the left.

On the surface, we could say that it’s not him; it’s her. Perhaps she has a personality issue with Democratic voters. In its endorsement of the former Secretary of State, the New York Times called her, “one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history.” Her experience makes that hard to dispute. Her approval ratings soared to 75% when she headed the State Department. In 2006 she won re-election to the Senate with a 12% boost in her share of the vote. Hillary Clinton performs extremely well in office, but her apparent sense of entitlement for the presidency makes it difficult for voters to like her, to connect with her. As a candidate running for office, she can be hard to love.

Moving deeper, though, it’s not just that Hillary Clinton struggles to knock people off their feet that explains the rise of Bernie Sanders. The exit polls from New Hampshire will give the Clinton campaign plenty of food for thought. 80% of voters in the Democratic primary said they were worried about the direction of the American economy. Of these, two-thirds chose Sanders over Clinton. Clinton, on the other hand, had a modest edge among the 20% who were satisfied with the direction of the economy. Moreover, even though just 18% of voters said they felt that they were falling behind financially, more than twice as many expect life to be worse for the next generation of Americans. Significantly, more Democrats think the next generation will be worse-off than better-off. That’s an even higher level of pessimism than that reported by Republican voters.

So Democrats who don’t feel much love for Hillary are feeling the Bern instead; not just because they don’t love Hillary but because they think America needs a more fundamental change than the vision she’s offering. In this week’s debate between Clinton and Sanders in Wisconsin, Clinton made every attempt to present herself as President Obama’s natural successor. That makes her the continuity candidate. That should be enough to see her safely through as the Democratic nominee, but a sizeable faction in her party is attracted to a more radical vision for America. And it’s more than mere infatuation.

 

Bridge over troubled water?

Several years before he stood for the presidency, Barack Obama declared in his 2004 ‘Audacity of Hope’ speech, “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America.” It was a call to unity. It was a call to move beyond the partisan politics that had created so much gridlock in Washington. It was at the cornerstone of his politics of hope and change.

The problem is that polarisation under his presidency has gotten much worse. Partisan antipathy is at an all-time high, and it’s not just in Washington; it’s palpable across the country.

Can anyone in the current race help to clean up all this bad blood in American politics? Democrats and Republicans can try living apart from each other as much as they like, but they can’t file for divorce. No party owns the country. The next president needs to find a way of making the United States more, well, united.

Could a President Trump pull Americans together? Could a President Sanders bridge the divide between left and right? They may be opposites but, interestingly enough, they attract people for similar fundamental reasons. The people who are most attracted to their candidacies are people who feel ignored by the political and economic system. But Trump and Sanders understand the problem of marginalisation in very different ways and offer very different visions about how to fix it. And even if their supporters agree that the economy is failing them, they’re still poles apart when it comes to the kind of society they want to live in.

Whoever moves into the White House next January won’t just have to come up with technocratic policy solutions. A large part of his or her energy will need to be spent trying to bring Americans together. A few years ago during a speech in Harlem, President Obama surprised his audience by singing a few lines from Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together. America’s next president will have to pull out all the stops. It’s going to take more than mood music to rebuild America’s broken relationships within itself.