# A Veteran Election Forecaster Warns America Is at Its Most Divided in a Century > Larry Sabato has spent his career reading the moods of the American electorate. His verdict on the present is bleak, that the country is more bitterly partisan than at any point in over a hundred years, and that the usual mechanisms for cooling it down may no longer work. - Source: Morning Week - Canonical URL: https://morningweek.com/article/a-veteran-election-forecaster-warns-america-is-at-its-most-divided-in-a-century - Author: Morning Week Newsroom - Section: World - Published: 2026-08-16T15:24:56.950Z - Updated: 2026-08-16T15:24:56.950Z - Tags: United States, Larry Sabato, polarization, elections, democracy, Donald Trump, midterms, partisanship --- Few people have watched American elections more closely, or for longer, than Larry Sabato. From his perch at the University of Virginia, where he founded and still runs the Center for Politics and publishes the forecasting newsletter that made his name, he has spent decades tracking the country's political weather. So when a man of his temperament, more given to careful prediction than to alarm, says the United States is living through its most partisan era in over a century, it is worth pausing over the claim. That is precisely what he now argues. The polarisation of American life, in his reading, has passed beyond the ordinary back and forth of a two party system and hardened into something closer to tribal enmity. The two sides no longer merely disagree about policy. They increasingly regard one another not as rivals to be beaten at the next election but as enemies to be defeated, and that shift, he warns, changes the nature of the democratic contest itself. ## A number that should unsettle everyone Sabato reaches for a striking figure to make the point. In one survey of a thousand supporters of Donald Trump, a clear majority, some 51 percent, agreed that the states that vote Democratic should be allowed to break away from the Union altogether. That so many citizens of a single country could contemplate its dissolution with equanimity is, for Sabato, a measure of how far the sense of shared national belonging has frayed. What troubles him as much as the number is what lies behind it, which he describes as the loss of a certain sportsmanlike spirit that once held the system together. For most of the modern era, he argues, Americans could lose an election and still accept the winner as legitimate, could oppose a president fiercely and still regard the office as belonging to the whole country. That reflex, the willingness to grant the other side its victories, is the quiet machinery on which democracy runs, and it is wearing out. ## How it hardened The change did not happen overnight, and the data trace its arc. Where once partisans mostly saw their opponents as wrong, now they see them as bad. Surveys have found the share of Republicans and Democrats who regard the other party as more immoral than ordinary Americans climbing sharply over the past decade, until large majorities on both sides hold that view. Once a rival becomes a moral inferior rather than a fellow citizen with different ideas, compromise starts to look less like statesmanship and more like surrender. Sabato is careful not to pretend the two sides are mirror images, and much of the current anxiety centres on the norms of the presidency itself in Trump's second term. But his larger point is structural. The machinery of American politics, its primaries, its media, its incentives, now rewards the politician who inflames the base over the one who reaches across the aisle, and punishes cooperation as weakness. The system, in other words, is not merely reflecting the division. It is manufacturing more of it. ## Can the midterms still work This is where his professional expertise sharpens the warning. American democracy has a built in corrective, the midterm election, which historically acts as a brake on a sitting president by handing the opposition a chance to check him two years in. The voters, in the normal course of things, deliver a rebuke, the president is forced to moderate, and the machine self corrects. It is one of the system's oldest safety valves. Sabato's unsettling question is whether that valve still functions in an age this polarised. If most voters are locked so firmly into their tribe that almost nothing an administration does will move them, then the midterm loses its power to discipline. An election that once sent a message becomes merely a headcount of two immovable armies, and the feedback loop that kept presidents in check goes quiet. The coming vote, he suggests, will test whether the old rule still holds or has quietly expired. ## A warning, not a forecast For a man whose brand is prediction, Sabato is notably reluctant to say how it ends. He does not forecast civil war, and he resists the melodrama that has attached itself to the subject. What he offers instead is a diagnosis, that the connective tissue of a shared civic life is thinning, and a caution that institutions which have absorbed enormous strain before may not be as sturdy as Americans assume. Systems can endure a great deal, right up until the moment they cannot. The value of a witness like Sabato is precisely his lack of hysteria. He has seen the country angry before, has watched it swing between the parties and recover its balance, and he is not given to declaring the republic doomed. That is what makes his verdict land. When an analyst who has spent his life counselling calm says the temperature is now higher than at any time in over a century, the sensible response is not panic, but attention. --- Originally published by Morning Week. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://morningweek.com/article/a-veteran-election-forecaster-warns-america-is-at-its-most-divided-in-a-century.