Voters No Longer Splitting Their Tickets. NewsWire

NEwsWire: 2/16/21 

• The number of split delegations in the Senate has fallen to its lowest since the direct election of senators began. Only six states now have senators from different parties; for most of the last century, this number hovered between 10 and 20. (Pew Research Center)
• NH: Back when Boomers (and even Xers) were young, it was fashionable to say that America was becoming a "post-partisan" democracy: a nation in which the electorate no longer cared about "meaningless" political labels and increasingly crossed party lines to elect the "best person."
• That era, if it ever existed, is now officially dead.
• In fact, Americans are today less likely to split their votes across party lines than at any time in living memory. In this new report, Pew puts this trend into long-term historical perspective. At the start of the 117th Congress, the one running from 2021 to 2023, only 6 states will have senators who represent more than one party. That's the smallest number since 1914--the first year in which senators were elected by the public rather than appointed by state legislatures.

• The numbers in this historical chart don't always add up to 100 either because in some years (1) a dispute delayed seating a senator when the new congress opened or (2) some states like Alaska or Hawaii didn't yet exist. In the 117th, the two new Democratic senators from Georgia weren't included for the second reason. If you include them (the two Democrats are now sworn, after all), you have 22 states with two Democrats, 22 states with two Republicans, and only 6 states split between the two parties.
• Nothing quite resembles where we are today. The only historical congresses that come close were those in the mid-1950s (when the northern electorate galvanized briefly around the GOP) and those in the late-1930s (when Democrats came close to annihilating the GOP). In 1937-39, only 4 states had two Republican senators--in part because the total number of Republican senators had been battered down to a mere 16.
• If you go back to the late '70s and early '80s, by contrast, split states dominated the Senate. In the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan years, many voters were confused about how the parties really differed. These were also years in which many voters "crossed over" in their presidential votes: northern Republicans, for example, voting for Carter, or southern and midwestern Democrats voting for Nixon and Reagan.
• Indeed, senate-president cross-over voting follows the same trend as split-senate voting. At the same time that voters in any one state are becoming less likely to elect senators of different parties, so too are they becoming less likely to vote for a president of a different party. These findings come from another Pew report.

• In 2020, every elected senator--except one--belonged to the same party as the state's current or most recent choice for president. (The exception was Senator Susan Collins of Maine.) That one exception in 35 elected senators translates into a mere 3%. In 2016, when Donald Trump took on Hillary Clinton, there were no exceptions (0%). But in earlier elections, such cross-overs were common. Through most of the 1980s, more states actually voted for senators and presidential candidates in different parties than the other way around.
• Over the past forty years, such cross-overs have mostly helped Democrats. In fact, especially during the 1980s and 2000s, they often enabled the Democrats to control the Senate even when a Republican occupied the White House. The biggest pro-GOP cross-over happened in 2010, when incoming "tea-party" Senators managed to retrieve 5 seats for the Republicans.

• Why is this happening? Driving the dramatic decline in split and crossover voting are three fundamental trends in the American electorate.
• The first and most important is the rising polarization and sorting of voters over issues. That is, voters increasingly have strong feelings about issues (polarization) and these strong feelings, across all issues, are increasingly putting them all into one partisan camp or the other (sorting). At the same time, the two parties are creating for themselves emotional mega-brands that align with dichotomous world views. In this environment, it gets harder to cross party lines.
• The result is not only less ticket splitting, but also rising emotional engagement (according to surveys tracking "feeling thermometers"); the growing role of negative motivation (that is, more voting against the other candidate than for your candidate); and shrinking attention to any one issue (versus all the issues together).
• The partisan "approval" versus "disapproval" gap for each president over the past several decades has been steadily widening. As megabrands, the two parties now vie with each other in rallying supporters around apocalyptic national choices. In the run-up to 2020, for example, nine in ten voters believed the "other" candidate would do lasting damage to the nation and a growing share believed violence is justified in advancing political goals. (See "America on the Verge of a Civil War?" and "Growing Share of Voters Say Violence May be Justified.")
• The second driver is geographic alignment. It's not just that voters are sorting themselves into two parties. It's also that these parties are concentrating in different places--most dramatically, by rural versus urban, and also by the social and cultural region in which they live. "Red states" are where Republicans concentrate around their brand. "Blue states" are where Democrats do the same around theirs. Increasingly, states are voting the same way not just for the president and their senators, but also for their congresspeople and for their state representatives.
• The third driver is the nationalization of politics. Once upon a time, voters figured that the most important issues in their lives were decided by their own state leaders. They could therefore be a bit creative or experimental in their national votes. A culturally conservative plains state could elect a very progressive senator, for example--like George McGovern, Frank Church, or Tom Harkin. Or a culturally liberal northeastern state could elect a pro-life senator or governor--like Bob Casey or Joe Lieberman.
• That no longer happens. Voters increasingly focus less on, and know less about, local politics. Instead, they assume that all the big issues will be decided at the federal level--either by the President, Congress, or the Supreme Court--and they direct their attention accordingly. As voters focus more on the national ballot, they are more likely to avoid electing two leaders who "cancel each other out." (For a great book on this topic, see The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized by Daniel Hopkins.)
• So much for what's causing this trend. How will it change America's political future?
• The most important effect, IMO, will be to put greater importance on winning the top of the ticket--that is, the presidency--and on unifying the party around a single and coherent national brand. Once voters choose a national leader and a national brand, they no longer want to deviate much from that choice down the rest of their ticket.
• In earlier decades, many Americans preferred "divided government" in order to prevent either party from over-reaching once it gets power. But by the end of 2020, after a year of plague, gridlock, and partisan unrest, that too seems to be changing. According to a recent Gallop poll, a record share of voters now prefer one party controlling both Congress and the White House (41%) versus those preferring divided government (23%).
• All of this has to help the Democrats as they look forward to 2024. And for one simple reason: They are now the more unified national party. To be sure, the Democrat Party remains afflicted by significant fissures--between its social-justice leftists and its technocratic moderates, between its PC radicals and its market pragmatists, and between its mainly-white seculars and its mainly-nonwhite church-goers. But none of those compare with the gigantic divide now confronting the Republican Party--between the Trump brand and the anti-Trump brand.
• If the GOP can't repair this chasm by the 2024 election, it is in deep trouble.
• In the 2022 mid-term, Republicans hope to benefit from two tail winds: the backlash that typically benefits the opposition after the start of a new presidency; and the fruits of the 2020 decennial redistricting. But in a climate less favorable to divided government, the Republicans may find themselves struggling even in 2022, especially if they remain hopelessly split and their only message is: We aren't Joe Biden. In that case, they do well only if Biden veers out of the mainstream, stumbles badly, or both. Which means they don't have much of a game plan except to hope that the other team messes up.