well, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, they used to shoot at each other.
but i guess if what the number crunchers say is true, i want to know why we're always so disappointed in dem voting patterns? and even when we're not, i want to say that a lot of votes these days are essentially meaningless -- they're about going on record as having voted for/against something, not about actually getting anything done. it's sort of difficult to imagine that such strategies are innovations of the last 50 years, but maybe easier than believing against the apparent evidence that the parties differ more now than they did 50 years ago.
on the other hand, not only is the country pretty polarized in some important ways, but the geographical alignment is becoming significant. perhaps a new sectionalism or something (why do i think ruy texeira has done something on this? if i had more energy at the moment i would try to track it down). and surely that is going to be reflected significantly in the house and even sometimes in the senate. do the vote and base analyses you're talking about go down to the state level? i'm guessing not, but it would be interesting to see.
i'm willing to be persuaded that my general sense of convergence is mistaken, but i'd need to have my perception made sense of somehow by the statistical analysis, and i'm not there, yet.
j
-- "Science seems to be at war with itself.... *Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false." -- Bertrand Russell
*http://brainmortgage.blogspot.com/