Those days are over. During a couple of decades, one of the two major parties alienated me to the point where I wouldn’t support its candidates no matter who they were. Somewhat to my regret, I’ve become a straight-ticket partisan. At times, I felt I was expressing membership in a tribe rather than making intelligent political decisions. But that’s the way things have turned out.
I’m not going to burden you with the details of how I arrived at my straight-ticket partisanship. I do want to note that in making this move, I was evolving in exactly the way most of the American electorate has evolved in the 21st century. The overwhelming majority of us now cast relatively mindless ballots for the party whose candidates match our emotional loyalties.
It’s not hard to come up with numbers that document what has happened. When President Richard Nixon won landslide re-election as a Republican in 1972, carrying every state but one, he was dealing with an alignment of 31 Democratic governors. A half-century later, there are only eight governors from the party that lost the presidential vote in their states. There are 99 legislative chambers in this country, and only a handful of them are controlled by their state’s losing party in the presidential voting. In 2022, only six states voted for different parties for the U.S. Senate and for governor.
Back in the 1990s, at a time when the split-ticket era was drawing to a close, two distinguished political scientists, Barry C. Burden and David C. Kimball, wrote a convincing book explaining that voters didn’t split their tickets because they preferred divided government but because they were seeking out centrist candidates wherever they could find them. Today we have just about stood that theory on its head: Centrism doesn’t matter — partisan affiliation is what matters. And the winners are more often ideologues than pragmatists in the middle.
The question is why. There’s no one magic-bullet explanation. Perhaps the leading candidate is the “big sort” theory, first propounded by the journalist Bill Bishop in 2008. Bishop argued that more than in any previous period of American history, we are clustering together with our social and political soulmates rather than living in communities of diverse ideological makeup. Residents of liberal Austin, Texas, Bishop’s hometown, settled down among neighbors who thought and voted the way they did. The same was true of residents of conservative exurban territory all over the country. So Austin had become straight-ticket Democratic territory. Rural West Texas remains uniformly conservative and Republican. Further research concluded that most big cities produced such lopsided Democratic majorities that their electorates were wasting votes that would have been more valuable in more diverse constituencies.
The big sort plays into the hands of gerrymandering mapmakers, for whom it is relatively easy to draw districts that cluster voters essentially in single-party enclaves, to the benefit of the party drawing the lines. Since the districts nearly all tilt heavily to one party or the other, the action is all in the primaries, and there is relatively little general-election competition. A state may as a whole be divided relatively closely between the parties, as are, for example, Wisconsin and North Carolina, but the districts within them are solid straight-ticket enclaves when it comes to voting in both state and federal elections.
But there is more to this than the big sort and gerrymandering. Even statewide voting has generally gone in bifurcated directions, with one party or the other winning by margins much larger than existed a generation ago. This year there will be elections for governor in 11 states, and only a small handful of them stand any chance of being competitive. In the rest, the voting will be either straight-ticket Democratic or straight-ticket Republican.
IT MIGHT MAKE SENSE TO PAUSE FOR A MOMENT and ponder the success of the few governors who have succeeded in breaking out of the straight-ticket straitjacket. The political consultant Whit Ayres has argued that governors can break through from the minority side because voters expect different things than they do from legislators or presidents. “Governors actually make life or death decisions,” Ayres said. “People are looking for good-sense judgment in governors more than senators or congressmen, where increasingly they’re just looking for someone to join the blue team or the red team.”
Maybe so. But breaking the straitjacket is difficult for gubernatorial candidates, even for talented ones from the minority party. In most of the cases where they do it, there is a fairly simple explanation: The state’s majority party, dominated by ideological fringe forces, nominates a weak candidate, usually someone eccentric, ethically questionable or unpleasantly dogmatic, allowing a challenger from the minority party to break through. This is how Democrats have elected governors in recent years in rigidly Republican Louisiana, Kansas and Kentucky. In other cases, the minority-party candidate has managed to convince voters that he or she is not ideologically very different from majority-party values, and may be the more competent choice. This is how Republicans have found gubernatorial success in Democratic-dominated Massachusetts, Maryland and Vermont.
But the crucial point is not that this happens; it’s that it doesn’t happen very often, and less and less frequently in recent years. The majority of the governors elected this year will be able to coast home once they’ve won their party’s primary.
As many plausible political explanations as there may be for our epidemic of straight-ticket voting, it would be foolish to deny that it also reveals the cultural tribalism that has taken root in American society since this century began. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 drew upon resentments among residents of rural and small-town America, in the South and in the Midwest, against the perceptions that a liberal bicoastal elite had stacked the deck against them, leaving their communities helpless against the depredations of global capitalism and unwanted immigration. And it left coastal liberals increasingly convinced that middle America was a cultural enemy. That tribalism has spilled over into elections at the state and local levels, leaving one-party politics as the norm in the vast majority of American constituencies.
MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN RECENT YEARS about the dangers that straight-ticket politics imposes on successful democracy. Single-party constituencies, in which primaries and not general elections are the decisive events, tend to produce contests in which rigid ideologues capture a majority of votes in the dominant party and go on to produce a legislative stalemate and dogmatic posturing instead of bipartisan compromise.
I’d be lying if I said there was a simple fix for this. Political failures, such as gerrymandering, can be addressed. Cultural divisions are far more resistant to repair. Still, we have faced similar levels of straight-ticket tribalism in the American past, and managed to deal with it.
In the closing decades of the 19th century, American politics was burdened by a straight-ticket tribalism perhaps even more intense than the current one. Southern Democrats were embittered at the Yankee values and culture that had upended their social world. Northerners saw southerners as unreconstructed rebels who had tried to tear the Union apart, and nearly succeeded. It was impossible for a Republican to win an election in Mississippi. It was almost as rare for a Democrat to win statewide in Pennsylvania. Regional inequality was rampant, and it was in many ways a tribal issue.
And yet by the second decade of the new century, a bipartisan consensus had developed that made it possible for American government to attack the glaring inequities of the economic system. That’s what made it possible for Theodore Roosevelt to govern as a Republican reform president and for Democrat Woodrow Wilson, for all his personal faults, to soften the inequities of the tariff, enact new regulation of predatory capital and create a Federal Reserve banking system. We didn’t conquer the tribalism of the era’s politics, but we overcame it.
Could something like that happen again? I’m not predicting it. I’m only saying it has happened before.
