America Is Divided. Except at Costco.

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**Michael Smerconish** (1:01)
Welcome to The Smerconish Podcast for Independent Minds.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:05)
There are a pair of political scientists writing a book about who Americans are and how they vote. One of them, an academic from Tufts, will be here in the second hour of the program. And what caught my eye about their research, a was the fact that they've got an enormous sample size, 700,000 respondents. But they did something really interesting in terms of pursuing the extent of our commonality. And that is that rather than asking, like, who did you vote for and how do you feel about immigration or the size of the debt or fill in the blank, they said, what's the most important thing that happened in your life in the past year?
And the Trump voters gave them a list of three things.
And the Harris voters gave them a list of three things. And the three things were exactly the same. I love that out of the box approach. I also love this. This is my favorite story in today's newsletter. I'll set it up this way. Somewhere in this country last night, in all likelihood, a grown adult was on a date night, a real romantic, put on a nice shirt kind of date night, where, walking the concrete aisles of a warehouse club, splitting a slice of pizza off a paper plate, and somewhere else, somebody's getting engaged next to a palette of paper towels stacked 12 feet high.
Today, there might be a surprise birthday party breaking out in the food court. After all, recently, a brass band showed up and played a set inside a warehouse in Alabama during Mardi Gras. And oh yeah, on opening day in Colorado, a Rockies fan smuggled an entire rotisserie chicken, the whole bird, into Coors Field and sat there in the stands, eating it with his hands like a man who found religion. That, my friends, is not a supermarket. That is a town square. That is a movement. And I think it says a lot about us and our diminished shared culture. I had a great radio guest here a couple of months ago, Ben Fritz from the Wall Street Journal. And by the way, Ben made the cut for The Mingle Project because the audio of the interview that I did with him is one of those that is readily accessible on the Mingle page. So anytime I mention this subject matter and you find it of interest and you want more, chances are you can go to my archive. It's all there, beautifully cataloged. Why was Ben Fritz here? OK, he had written this journal essay, part of a big series marking America's 250th birthday, you know, like, where are we and so forth. And the title of it was The Rise and Fall of the American Monoculture. You remember this? He reminded us that in the US, there was a time not too far ago, not too long ago, when we were all watching one thing. For example, in 1939, Gone with the Wind sold something like 200 million movie tickets. Now, here's the stunner. We were a nation of 130 million people. In other words, everybody went to Gone with the Wind and some went several times over.
Fast forward 1983, when MASH signed off, more than 100 million Americans sat down on the same night in front of the same broadcast and said goodbye to the same characters at the same moment. Three networks, a handful of movie studios, a few record labels. They pointed the whole country in the same direction. People sat around the same campfire and, oh yeah, I would add, and then went to work the following day at a time when everybody was working in the company of others and talk about it.