In the “Is McCain forked yet?” thread someone made a claim that the expected Congressional blow-out for the Dems will induce people to split tickets and vote against the Democratic Presidential nominee. I tried to research it and found no evidence of significant ticket splitting during Presidential election years.
OTOH I have to wonder if we are in for a Reagan sort of year. Will this be a year of massive Dem turn-out across the board, even in states that Obama loses, and many of the GOP sitting it out as they did after Watergate and as Dems did after Carter, with the result of a second double digit Congressional pick-up of perhaps several dozens similar to the Reagan Revolution? Will Obama’s 50 state strategy coupled with huge disaffection among the GOP result in what will be called by historians an “Obama Bonanza” for the Democrats?
Wikipedia has pretty thorough results of the House, Senate and Presidential elections, FWIW. in 1996, Dems gained 8 House seats.
I think regardless of whether Obama wins or not, Republicans are heading for a bruising in House and Senate elections. This has been in the cards for a good 2 years now.
A more useful one is here. The same party has controlled both houses and the Presidency for only 4 of the last 16 Congressional terms, 7 of the last 27 … oh, well, you can do your own counting.
Hmmm. Interesting chart. (Hadn’t found it so my data collection was a bit more cumbersome.)
Of note in it however is that the House has been Democratic all but 2 of 31 Sessions (GOP or Dem President) until Bill Clinton came into office and since then 6 sessions were GOP majority until this last election cycle.
The Senate has flipped some but no real pattern emerging of it being with or against the Presidential party overall.
Reagan’s revolution made huge progress in giving him a less unfriendly Congress but he was still working with the other party having a majority in the House and the Senate too once.
Yes, three flips of the coin will get all three the same way only about 1/3 of the time. 1 out of four is hardly outside statistical chance. Not quite the proof of voters splitting votes to assure parity/gridlock/whathaveyou that you put it forth as.
So yes, if Obama wins and there are also the major wins expected in Congress for the Dems, he’ll be in uncommon company having the solid majority of both. Of course that company includes Carter and GWBush so it does not necessarily mean an effective Presidency.
No. Split ticket voting just means you don’t vote straight ticket. It doesn’t mean pick the person you want to be president, and then fill in the bubbles on the rest of the sheet on the other side. From your quote taken from wiki in the other thread:
If elected officials are being good to their word, and you’ve voting on them based on what their word is, then you’re voting for who you think the best candidate is. Middle school civics stuff, yet you still don’t understand it. :rolleyes:
Thanks for the remedial math help guys. I don’t know what I did. Don’t tell my kids, 'kay?
But amazingly it is almost exactly as would be expected by chance. Despite the pattern of midterm pick-ups for the party that does not occupy the White House.
(Why I bother I don’t know.) No, Elvis, that pattern is inconsistent with the hypothesis of ticket splitting. The Dems maintained the House through both Dem and GOP administrations … until Clinton.
Some people, in some particular cases, prefer a POTUS of one party and a Congresscritter of the other; but nobody (well, nobody but total asstards) votes for divided government as an end-in-itself.
Hi. I’m a total asstard. Generally, I believe in the dialectic, where the antithesis of the Democrats and the thesis of the Republicans unify into a synthesis which, while a bit inefficient, keeps this ship of state afloat.
Problem is, last eight years, it’s been thesis, ignore the antithesis, no synthesis results. Not healthy, you ask me.
Personally, as a rule of thumb, I like a Republican president, a Democratic House, a Republican Senate and a Democratic Supreme Court.
But consider that, in a parliamentary system, divided government never exists (the legislature chooses the executive), and yet many modern democracies do very well with such a system. In fact, I don’t see how our separation-of-powers system has any better a track record. Maybe this is just one of those things about which the Framers were wrong.
