Good question. And why does it only apply on the national level?
Local and state politics can and many times are one party states.
The city of LA is a one party state and so is the state of california. Meanwhile a rural county in Oklahoma is a one party state just like the state itself is.
So why are we only evenly divided nationally when we accept extreme lopsidedness on a state or local level?
I think you’re on to something here, at least in the general case.
In local elections, it doesn’t quite hold, as I suspect people are more polarized about those issues- they know they don’t want THAT guy in city council, for example.
But for Federal level posts, I think it’s probably very accurate.
Obviously?
Without crunching all the numbers, I’d guess for the same reason the Moon and the Sun are the same angular size in the sky. We happen to live in a time where this is true, it wasn’t true in the past, and it will be untrue again some time in the future. (But unlike the Sun-Moon thing, it might then become true at a later date.)
Isn’t that pretty much exactly what parties are constantly trying to do? But the problem, it seems to me, is that the other party is constantly doing it too. If you’re in a two-party system, with both parties trying to run the most competitive candidates and campaigns possible, it’s only natural that they will reach an equilibrium where there are lots of very close elections. When that doesn’t happen, the out-party generally finds a way to shift its messaging, or its style, so that it becomes competitive again.
Because we only fight over the things that we’re pretty evenly split on.
You can see this happen with individual issues as the public support for them changes. Look at Same-Sex Marriage. In the 1990s, there was bipartisan support for DOMA, outlawing it on a federal level. Sure, there was a smallish faction of Democrats who supported gay rights, but it wasn’t a major party platform.
When Obama was first elected, both Presidential candidates were on record as being opposed to it (although many people assume that Obama wasn’t really opposed personally, but recognized it was not a winning issue to stake a claim on).
Then there was a whole flurry of political activity around it. It was the defining wedge issue for a time! And now a decade later: basically radio silence. The fight isn’t over exactly. There are still plenty of places where a majority of locals are opposed to it, but as a national party platform, there’s nothing there. We didn’t hear a peep about it in the 2016 election. The Republicans were falling all over themselves to not bring it up. And now you can’t even get elected County Clerk in Kentucky on a homophobic platform any more.
That’s what it looks like when support of an issue goes from 60/40 split to a 40/60 split.
Could it be that there is a “nearness” factor? A local election will produce a greater margin of difference, whereas a national election will produce a narrower margin of difference.
Or could it be sample size? A local election involves a smaller sample, as the sample size grows the margin of difference shrinks.
It would be interesting for an economist to crunch this all out. But even if these theories I posed were proven out, that would only demonstrate the phenomenon, it would not explain it.
You mean to tell me that the immigrant caravan was just a cynical ploy and not an actual issue? I mean, surely the issue was so important that the problem was completely solved. Why else has it not been in the news at all since Tuesday.
Its almost like now that the white nationalists have voted GOP to keep the scary, foreign born brown horde from invading, the issue has been forgotten.
I think it’s partly because whenever things are going badly (especially poor economy), the party in power gets blamed for it, and the power shifts to the other party.
1: Don’t forget that the system is dynamic and involves nominally intelligent actors with agency. If one party can tweak its policies just enough to make a 50/50 split 52/48, the other party can tweak its policies to turn 52/48 into 50/50.
2: It may be less about the popular vote than about swing votes in swing districts/states or motivating your potential voters to go vote/your opponent’s potential voters to stay home. If playing on motivation makes a bigger difference than swaying swing voters, this will accentuate party differences, not moderate them.
3: Electoral systems designed to accommodate a small number of parties result in parties with sizable internal factions, each of which may be much more willing to gore the other factions’ oxen than its own for the sake of winning an election, especially when there’s uncertainty about what and how much to sacrifice to win the election.
It’s what we would expect in a highly competitive environment; The best bid is the one you win by 1 penny.
Agreed. In a two party system, each party will attempt to have policies as broad reaching as possible. Once, say, the public is 60/40 Dems, the Republicans have no choice other than to begin to cease to exist as a party, or else change its views so that some of those 60 switch over.
We say this from the 1930s to the 1950s. The GOP was hard core against economic regulation and government welfare. They were in single digits in the House. They had to accept that the public wanted some form of social welfare to remain relevant.
In the late 80s, the Dems were in danger of becoming a permanent minority. Anti-crime, anti death penalty, pro expansion of the welfare state. Clinton put them back to the center.
If in a dystopian future society where the main debate is whether to let poor people starve to death or to simply imprison them, then we would have two parties to coalesce around those positions.
This is a feature of democracy: to represent the wishes of the people, not to proclaim the “correct” position from upon an ivory tower.
Yes, the OP’s premise seems flawed as stated. (Someone please present evidence that there are an unusual number of close races this year, if you have it!)
It’s not unusual to only pay close attention to the close races, of course — and the more interested we are in the outcomes, the more we’ll focus on the nail-biters.
This is kind of like saying supply and demand and the law of diminishing returns explain 90% of economics. It’s taking a very simplistic and deterministic view of human behavior; it’s also just … wrong.
In a political environment sliced, diced, polled and sampled to the nth degree every candidate is happy to win 50% plus margin of error. Money and resources (policy too) of political parties are allocated to maximum number of wins, not maximum vote. It’s an absolute waste in a practical sense to run up the score in one district if that means a close loss in another.
I disagree with the premise. We just had a national election and the Democrats led by something like 54% to 46%, didn’t they? Even in the most recent presidential election, it was closer to 52%-48% than it was to 50-50.
The flaw in the premise is taking two or three close elections and saying that’s some sort of representative sample. And, one of the reasons that George, at least, is close is due to some pretty impressive voter suppression efforts on the part of one of the candidates who also happened to be in charge of the election.
So, the OP is making a claim – the electorate is close to a 50-50 Democrat/Republican split. Is that actually the case?
Patently that is not the case. It’s more like 25% DEM, 25% GOP, 50% disengaged
I think this needlessly poisons the well. Whatever the electoral system, whether fair or unfair, causes a sufficient number of votes on each side to make the races for president and control of the House and Senate competitive. If it did not, the one or the other parties would have to move toward the other to pick off the median voter.
I certainly didn’t mean to poison the well, so I apologize for that if I did. My main point is, the OP makes a claim – we’re 50/50 split, not 52/48 or wider. I dispute this claim – I think the election just a week ago shows that we’re not 50/50, since the Democrats were well ahead of that. The OP uses two disputed elections to make the claim, but there’s no reason that those two elections represent the country.
So, are we so evenly divided? I’d like a cite for that claim.
They don’t. The electoral college gives voters in rural states an outsize influence relative to their numbers.