Is it random luck that in the US, politics is evenly divided on the national level, or is there some other reason

Politics & Elections
1

In the US, politics can be heavily biased on the local and state level. That seems to be the common trend. Rural Mississippi is deeply republican and urban California is deeply democrat. The (vast) majority of local and state races are pretty much predetermined and not really competitive.

The vast majority of US house seats are not competitive. Of 435 total seats, 366 are considered not even competitive at all, so 84%. Another 16% are considered somewhat competitive but not really, they have a lean one way or the other. Only 4% of house seats are considered truly competitive.

https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/house-race-ratings

Its the same with state level electoral votes. Of 50 states, only 6-7 were considered swing states that would determine the presidential election. The other 43-44 states were considered basically pre-determined, but somehow with the vast majority of state EVs being predetermined, it worked out to a competitive national race.

My question is that in the house, senate and presidency, on the federal level, things pretty much break even between the two parties in the US. However this isn’t the case on the local or state level as I said.

So how do a bunch of highly biased local and state districts somehow lead to a near 50/50 split in power between the two parties?

Is it just random chance, or is there some political science reason for why power is split 50/50 on the federal level, despite the vast majority of local and state power being heavily biased towards one party or another?

My impression is the democrats used to have a huge margin in congress during the Fifth party system due to the new deal coalition and southern whites being democrats due to rejection of republicans who they saw as pro-civil rights. But the 6th and 7th party systems seem to be pretty evenly divided.

I guess my point is is it just random chance that power in the executive and legislative branches in the US is roughly 50/50 in modern times despite the vast majority of local and state elections being non-competitive, or do the general public for whatever reason prefer highly competitive federal elections despite them wanting highly non-competitive elections on the local and state level?

Do other developed nations see this same trend of totally non-competitive elections on the local and regional level, but it someone translates into a near 50/50 split on the federal level? So even if the vast majority of congressional elections are not competitive, it somehow still translates into a nearly even split in congressional power? Of course other nations tend to have more than 2 parties though, so its not really accurate to compare.

2

I don’t know enough about US elections to comment on your general question, but I would suggest that the huge advantage of incumbents, both at the state level and the federal level, may have something to do with it. The stats you cite point to great stability in the make-up of the elected members, which may have something to do with the question.

To answer your question about how it works in other countries, in parliamentary systems, particularly with single member ridings elected on first-past-the-post, as in Canada and the UK, incumbents don’t have the huge advantage as in the US. There are safe seats, certainly, but the only way to change the government is by votes for the local MP.

If Party A is in power, and I want Party B, I will not vote for Party A’s candidate in my riding, no matter how good an MP they’ve been. I will vote for the Party B candidate, because that’s the only way to elect a Party B government.

We can’t split the ballot and keep electing the Party A candidate, while voting against that party generally. That greatly weakens the incumbency factor.

There’s also the internal structure of our House of Commons. Membership on committees is determined by the party caucus, not by seniority, and the committees are not as powerful as they seem to be in the Congress. So, I won’t vote for a long-standing MP “because they bring home the bacon”. Even if their party is returned to power, there’s no guarantee they’ll be in the same committee again.

There’s also election funding. In most countries, there are limits to how much individuals can donate to a candidate, and there are limits to how much the candidate can spend. Also, it’s common in other countries that corporations can’t donate, only voters. That tends to level the playing field, and reduce the incumbency factor. I gather (from this board and general reading) that it’s easier for US incumbents to raise money because they are incumbents and have committee seniority, which in turn, means they’re more likely to be re-elected and increase their seniority.

The clearest example of this greater flexibility in Canada was in the 1993 election, where the Progressive Conservatives went from majority to 2 seats, and the Prime Minister lost her own seat.

3

Short answer: random chance.

America has a long history of close presidential elections. It also has a long history of even divided Congresses. Those two facts correlate, but not perfectly. Usually the closeness appears either when the public is crossing over from being conservative to liberal or vice versa as part of a longer trend or in a reaction against the past government, but not always. We’ve only had 40 or so presidential elections since the parties became solidified after the Civil War and the close elections form too small of a data set to extrapolate from.

Nevertheless, I think that the recent set of extremely close elections and Congresses is historically unusual and will be analyzed in textbooks for a long time. Non-political factors contributing to it include the move of population concentration to the South and Southwest, a rise in overall wealth while some areas are lagging, the increased percentage of immigrants, the development of national media and the internet, the hollowing out of cities for suburbs and exurbs, the loss of union power, the aging demographics, and the decreasing emphasis on mainstream religions while evangelical religions are growing.

Political factors include the fact that America has only two large parties, gerrymandering of states to over-represent one party, the destruction of the boss system in large cities, the swing toward presidential power over Congress, and the end of both parties having right, left, and center wings.

That last one is especially important. The middle 20% of the country used to make large swings from election to election because both parties could attract centrists either positively through policy choices or negatively through failed policies. Fewer people had rigid ideological preferences. Policies in the older sense are barely meaningful today. Buzzwords prevail. They always were important, though nobody called them that, but today they overwhelm everything else.

None of that explains why the country is on such a knife-edge and for so long. It mystifies me. It shouldn’t be happening. Nothing fully explains it. So I fall back on random chance. A roulette wheel can end up with the ball on zero or double zero multiple times in a row by random chance, too. Very unsatisfying as an answer but I can’t find anyone out there to give me a better one.

4

I think it’s just a local minimum in an optimization problem. The system is set up fall into these holes.

5

I think it’s a natural by-product of both parties trying to optimize their competitiveness. That is, if one party finds itself locked out of power, either at the presidential or congressional level, they have a strong incentive to do something different, and most of the time they succeed in making themselves competitive in the next election cycle. Why there were longer stretches of one-party rule in the past, I’m not sure, but in an era with less data, less accumulated experience, and less instantaneous feedback, parties may simply not have known how to adjust their strategies effectively.

(I am also not sure why this doesn’t carry over to the state level, where trifectas and supermajorities are common, and that may be the real weak point in this hypothesis – but maybe you can’t optimize your chances at the federal level and be competitive in states where the median voter is well to the left or well to the right of the median US voter, so you have to pick one?)

6

Yeah, roughly-equal parties are the natural end state of a two-party system. Something that everyone likes won’t make it into any party’s platform, because there’s no need, and nor will something that nobody likes.

7

I would add that there examples of MPs being returned because they were considered excellent at looking after their constituents. Perhaps the best example was BC’s NDP MP Svend Robinson, whose electoral success was in part due to the fact that even his opponents appreciated how he would take their concerns seriously and work for them.

8

There certainly have been many US politicians of both parties up through about 1990 who were so good at funnelling pork barrel spending into their district that nobody sane in the district would vote against them. by 1990 they were literally a dying breed as old age was killing them off and the newer nastier sort of politics made pork less bipartisan than it was.

9

So my response to this is that most elections aren’t competitive, even the presidential election is predetermined in about 90% of states.

We have 50 states. Only a handful of states are competitive, but those handful of competitive states determine who is president. Its the same with the house and senate, the vast majority of races are not competitive, but somehow we end up in a situation where we are about 50/50.

What also happens is which states are competitive change. In 2000, Florida and Ohio were swing states. Those aren’t swing states now. Some safely red states are blue now (VA, CO, NM). Some safely blue states are swing states now (MN, WI, MI, PA). Some new swing states have emerged (AZ, NV).

You have all this chaos and partisanship on the local and state level, all this demographic and ideological change, and the end result is elections are still determined by a handful of swing states 24 years later. Its just that which states are swing states has changed.

Congress was, to my understanding, overwhelmingly democratic from FDR until the Gingrich revolution in 1994. But since then its been pretty much split.

I’m not good at math, but I guess what I’m wondering is how do all of these hyper-partisan, non-competitive elections somehow result in a national electoral system that is 50/50? Its like all the partisanship on the local and state level somehow cancels itself out on the national level. Is there a mathematical concept for how a 50/50 split can emerge on higher levels from massive partisanship on lower levels?

Also why only on the national level? In CA, about 80% of state legislature seats are democratic. In Idaho, about 80-90% of state legislature seats are republican. This balancing on a knifes edge between power doesn’t happen on the local and state level, the vast majority of local and state elections are non-competitive.

If you break government down into 4 levels. Local, state, federal, global, is there any reason we see this 50/50 balance only on the federal level in the US? Global governance seems to end up in worlds where 2 superpowers emerge too, albeit I don’t know if thats accurate. Right now its the US vs China. Before it was the US vs USSR. Before that it was various European powers fighting for global dominance. France vs the UK during Napoleon.

But again, WW2 saw multiple superpowers fighting. And European history had more than 2 superpowers fighting for global dominance, although it seems England and France were generally the 2 leading superpowers.