What if All Politics Is National?

[jimmy olsen]

Doesn't sound good for political stability if the executive branch of the federal government is predominantly held by one party, while a majority of the states are controlled by an other.

Links and charts galore can be found here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/30/opinion/what-if-all-politics-is-national.html?_r=1

What if All Politics Is National?
SEPT. 29, 2015

Thomas B. Edsall

Democrats are counting on demographic change to help them win future presidential elections, including next year's.

But three developments are pushing the country to the right, counteracting the idea that demography is political destiny. First, the rise of negative partisanship – that is, the intense hostility members of one party feel toward members of the other. Next, the nationalization of elections – the increasing tendency of voters to opt for straight ticket voting at all levels of government. Finally, there is growing income inequality within legislative districts, and this has partisan repercussions that are not necessarily what you would expect. All three trends are interacting with each other to the advantage of Republican candidates in contests for the House of Representatives and for state legislatures.

Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster, political scientists at Emory University, report in their 2015 essay "The Rise of Negative Partisanship and the Nationalization of U.S. Elections in the 21st Century" that partisans' thermometer ratings of their own party have remained constant, 72 degrees in 1980 and 70 degrees in 2012. The thermometer rating question asks voters to place their feelings toward a particular political party on a scale of 0 to 100, coldest to hottest.

Voter opinions of the opposing party have become more negative. "The average rating of the opposing party fell from 45 degrees in 1980 to 30 degrees in 2012," Abramowitz and Webster write. They go on to point out that

Supporters of each party have come to perceive supporters of the opposing party as very different from themselves in terms of their social characteristics, political beliefs and values and to view opposing partisans with growing suspicion and hostility.


The accompanying chart illustrates the intensification of hostility toward the opposition party between 1972 and 2012. Negativity rules: Hostile views of the opposition party correlate more strongly with straight-ticket voting than favorable views of one's own party.

What this means in practical terms is that the traditional advantage of incumbency for members of the House and Senate has declined. It used to be that predictions of the outcomes of House and state legislative races gave great weight to incumbency; in recent years, the crucial factor in predicting outcomes in a given district is the presidential vote.

From 1960 to 1980, Republican House candidates won just under 60 percent of the districts where Republican presidential nominees performed well.

In other words, Democrats were once able to hold Congressional seats in districts that voted Republican in presidential elections.

In 1994, according to Abramowitz and Webster, both Republicans and Democrat began to win higher and higher percentages of districts in which their respective presidential candidates did well.

By 2012-14 this pattern was so strong, Abramowitz and Webster find, that Republicans had "won a remarkable 95 percent of contests in Republican-leaning districts while Democrats have won 93 percent of contests in Democratic-leaning districts."

The increase in straight-ticket voting has worked more to the advantage of Republican House candidates than of Democrats. Many Democrats in Republican-leaning districts could be defeated and over time they were. The far fewer Republican House members in Democratic-leaning districts limited the potential for Democratic gains. As a result, Abramowitz and Webster note,

the famous comment by the late Tip O'Neill that "all politics is local" now seems rather quaint. In the 21st century United States, it increasingly appears that all politics is national.



State legislative elections have been following the same pattern as contests for seats in the House of Representatives. Abramowitz and Webster tracked the relationship between the Democratic share of the presidential and the state legislative vote. This correlation rose steadily from .40 in the years 1972-88 to a modern record of .85 in 2012.

In practice, this means that voters are now, by overwhelming margins, casting ballots for State Senate and State House candidates who are members of the same party as the candidate they chose for the presidency.


Abramowitz and Webster conclude that "structural forces are likely to continue to work in favor of Republican candidates in future House elections."

Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, works on similar terrain. Earlier this year, Jacobson published "It's Nothing Personal: The Decline of the Incumbency Advantage in US House Elections," in The Journal of Politics. He writes:


Because Republicans enjoy a longstanding structural advantage in the distribution of partisans across districts, the emergence of a much more party-centered electoral process has given them a firm grip on the House even as they have become less competitive in contests for the presidency.


Jacobson points out that while the South led the nation in the nationalization of voting, the pattern has emerged in all sections of the country.

"Incumbent Democrats have been the big losers from this change," Jacobson observes, pointing out that from 1960 through 1992, they consistently won in more than 50 districts in which Republican presidential candidates were also victors. In contrast, "Republican incumbents have never won more than 28 Democratic-leaning districts."

Jacobson argues that even without Republican gerrymandering of House districts, the geographic distribution of Democrats and Republicans across the nation inherently produces gerrymandered results:

Democrats win the lion's share of minority, single, young, secular, gay and highly educated voters who are concentrated in urban districts that deliver lopsided Democratic majorities. Regular Republican voters are spread more evenly across suburbs, smaller cities and rural areas, so fewer Republican votes are 'wasted' in highly skewed districts.



The  inefficient distribution of Democratic voters is not new; it has been present at least since the 1970s, but has more recently become a powerful factor in the tilt of the House to the Republican Party.

Jacobson presents a collection of data points illustrating this inefficiency, showing the disparity between voting patterns nationally and in House elections.

While President Obama won by five million votes in 2012, Mitt Romney carried 226 congressional districts to Obama's 209; more people voted for Democratic House candidates that year, 50.7 to 49.3, but Democrats won 46.2 percent of House seats. If Republicans had carried only those districts that gave Romney two percentage points above his national average, they would still command a 226–209 House majority today, instead of their current majority of 246-188 (they lost one seat to resignation earlier this year).







Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding has been produced by three other scholars, John Voorheis, a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of Oregon, Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, and Boris Shor, a political scientist at Georgetown, in their working paper, "Unequal Incomes, Ideology and Gridlock: How Rising Inequality Increases Political Polarization."

The three examine state legislative districts for trends in partisan representation and in inequality and find that Republicans win more elections when inequality worsens. Their analysis demonstrates that:


Income inequality shifts the median ideology within state legislatures to the right, and increases the share of seats held by Republicans.


Rising inequality results in more defeats of moderate Democrats by Republicans than vice versa. Because of this, the legislature over all moves in a conservative direction while the Democratic caucus, with fewer moderates, moves to the left.

In an email exchange with the authors, they speculate that the disproportionate losses by moderate Democrats may result from the fact


that by the time our data starts in the 1990s, Republicans were pretty homogenous on taxes/welfare/redistribution. The remaining centrists were predominantly Democrats. So it's been the Democrats bearing the brunt of the further hollowing out of the center.


Voorheis, McCarty and Shor conclude that inequality begets more inequality:

Increases in income inequality move the entire legislature to the right, while at the same time increasing political polarization. This diminishes both the appetite and ability of state legislatures to engage in redistribution, which in turn further increases income inequality.


The consequences of negative partisanship, of the nationalization of politics and of increased inequality are very different at the federal level than they are at the state level.

In the states, just over half the population lives under one-party Republican rule. While Congress and the White House cannot agree on taxes, spending, immigration or any major issue, leaders in the 24 Republican-controlled states are winning enactment of a comprehensive conservative agenda.

Put another way, in a nation where the two major political parties are roughly equal, Republicans have full control of 24 states with 47.8 percent of the population, 152.4 million, Democrats have full control of only 7 states with 15.8 percent, 49.1 million. The remaining 17 states are under split control.

There are some broad, if tentative, conclusions to be drawn.

The three research papers cited above suggest that the Republican lock on the House will hold at least until 2022 — the first election in which new districts will be drawn on the basis of the 2020 census — but they also suggest that Democrats are likely to face an uphill battle for control of the House after 2022.

If Voorheis, McCarty and Shor are on target, Republicans have a vested political interest in exacerbating inequality because inequality moves voters to the right.

Insofar as elections have become nationalized, Democrats in the House and in state legislatures have legitimate concerns over Hillary Clinton's declining poll numbers. Democrats in close elections are now dependent on winning as many straight-ticket votes as possible, and the fewer votes Clinton receives – assuming for the moment that she is the nominee – the fewer votes are likely to go to Democrats in 2016 in down-ballot contests.

Finally, and most important: Republican success at the state level – in contrast with control of the United States House and Senate – has empowered the party to actually make policy without the crippling effects of partisan gridlock.

More law and regulatory policy – much of it conservative and controversial – has been enacted at the state level than at any other level of government in the past five years. In terms of policy initiatives, the 24 states where Republicans are in full control are the most productive of all: the 11 Confederate states, except Virginia, along with Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Wisconsin, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska (with a nominally non-partisan legislature), Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wyoming and Utah.





It is in these states that the retrenchment from social and economic liberalism is moving into high gear, as much of the rest of the country and the federal government remains mired in conflict.

The structural changes in the political system have, then, put the Republican Party in the vanguard of action on a gamut of issues from voting rights to union rights to reproductive rights; from taxation to health care and environmental policy to spending on the poor to education.

Democrats may have the edge in presidential elections, but Republicans now have the advantage where it counts: in the states, where they can set the policies that govern a majority of citizens' daily lives.

[Ideologue]

We need a civil war.

[Eddie Teach]

They claim rising inequality shifts voters to the right, but neither give evidence nor suggest an explanation. 

[jimmy olsen]

They claim rising inequality shifts voters to the right, but neither give evidence nor suggest an explanation. 

Go to the Times article and follow the link they embedded.

[mongers]

We need a civil war.

If it solves the problem of TDLR posts, then I agree.

[Martinus]

We need a civil war.

If it solves the problem of TDLR posts, then I agree.

No kidding. Especially with no highlights.

[jimmy olsen]

We need a civil war.

If it solves the problem of TDLR posts, then I agree.

Are you people serious? I haven't posted anything long today, just short news articles and Op-eds. I've posted  20k works here before and got less bitching then I got today.

[Ideologue]

Martinus is posting today.