Opinion It’s a really close election — somewhere far from your house
“U.S. presidential elections today, including this year’s contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, have two features that weren’t common a generation ago. They are almost always very close nationally. At the same time, tens of millions of Americans live in completely uncompetitive states.
It wasn’t always this way. Franklin D. Roosevelt won the national popular vote by 24 percentage points in his 1936 reelection bid; Richard M. Nixon finished 23 points ahead in 1972. The last true blowout was Ronald Reagan’s 18-point win in 1984. But since the 2000 election, the difference between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates nationally has been just three points on average.
And when an election was close, it used to be close everywhere. In 1976, Democrat Jimmy Carter won 50 percent to 48 percent over incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford. Only six states went for either Ford or Carter by 20 or more percentage points. On the flip side, in 24 states, the winning margin was five points or fewer. Half the states in the country were swing states at the time.
Fast-forward to 2000, which is in many ways the start of our current era, in which the country is split almost equally into blue and red America. The 2000 election was even closer than Ford vs. Carter, with Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush each winning about 48 percent of the vote nationally. But it wasn’t close everywhere. Fourteen states went to one of the candidates by 20 points or more. Fifteen states were within five points, a significantly lower number than in 1976.
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The 2020 election was also fairly close in terms of the popular vote (Joe Biden 51 percent, Trump 47 percent). But 19 states were won by one of the candidates by 20 or more points. They were within five points of one another in just eight states.
In a 50-year period, the number of blowout states tripled; the number of swing states shrunk by two-thirds. I expect this year’s election results to be similar to those from four years ago.
A nation of blowouts has some important implications. As I’ve lamented before, the issues and concerns of the few remaining swing states (fracking in Pennsylvania) get too much attention compared with the rest of the country.
Second, the lack of competition at the presidential level probably bleeds down to state and local politics. Thirty-nine states are now dominated by either the Democrats or the Republicans. That’s partly because of voter preferences. But another factor contributing to the rise of one-party states is that both Republican and Democratic operatives and officials are fixated on winning the White House and don’t invest much in terms of political staffing and spending in states where they can’t win at the presidential level. So Democrats in Tennessee and Republicans in Massachusetts have not only an ideological disadvantage but also a resource one.
Most important, the growing number of blowout states in presidential races is another illustration of today’s deep, perhaps intractable partisan polarization. States and entire regions have overwhelmingly backed one party or the other for more than two decades now in presidential elections. This partisanship also shows up in gubernatorial, Senate, state legislative and even city council races. So it’s entirely logical that people in Republican states are worried that a Democratic president will govern in a way that is fundamentally antithetical to their values. Same for Democrats under a Republican administration.
America today has very close elections. But for the overwhelming majority of citizens, that closeness is theoretical. They live in a place where one party will easily win — and the other party’s presidential candidate won’t make a single campaign stop.“
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