States with split politics

[Alps]

I noticed that although Kentucky usually votes Republican in Presidential elections, they have had mostly Democratic governors in recent history. Why is this? What other states have a split like this between two statewide-elected positions?

Note: This thread is NOT for bashing one side or the other. It's a fine line, please don't cross it.

[NE2]

[realjd]

There are plenty of people like myself who vote the person, not the party. Parties tend to be more moderate on both sides at the local level. See Mitt Romney the governor vs. Mitt Romney for presidential candidate for a good example of how a politician can adjust his or her politics to suit the race and locale.

[SP Cook]

IMHO,

I get TV commerials from both KY, OH and WV, all of which have said "split politics".  The major theme of the democrat ads seems to be how they disagree with every major premise of the national democrat party, but rather agree with the national Republican party.  The major theme of the Republicans is that a democrat is a democrat.

This works.  My recent governor's race was 50% democrat, 48% Republican, with 1% for the greenies and 1% for the Libertarians.  IMHO, you can divide the democrat vote into those that know the democrat is lying and are happy about it, and those that actually think otherwise.

[triplemultiplex]

Gerrymandering certainly helps this phenomenon when it comes to state legislatures.

[bugo]

There's no such thing as a "Democrat Party."

[Alps]

No one's really answered the question yet, though. Gerrymandering would apply to local elections on up to state and Federal representatives, but those aren't elected on a statewide level.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

Gerrymandering. Also, the timing of elections. (for example) Ohio holds their statewide elections the opposite even number years that the federal elections are held.

[NE2]

Gerrymandering would apply to local elections on up to state and Federal representatives, but those aren't elected on a statewide level.

Good point (unless there's a state-level electoral college? Does this ever happen?). But it may still have a secondary effect, making voters more familiar with members of the dominant party in the state legislature.

[Alps]

Gerrymandering would apply to local elections on up to state and Federal representatives, but those aren't elected on a statewide level.

Good point (unless there's a state-level electoral college? Does this ever happen?). But it may still have a secondary effect, making voters more familiar with members of the dominant party in the state legislature.

In NJ, redistricting has resulted in more Republican districts than Democratic, but our senators, governors, and Presidential electors are usually Democrats, as one would expect. These are all based on the popular vote. So I'm really wondering why the popular vote in Kentucky would go Democratic (hey SP Cook, use the proper names for ALL parties, k?) for one type of election and Republican for another.

[3467]

A state could set itself up like the electoral college but none have .  There was less splitting in this election
http://capitolfax.com/2012/11/26/illinois-new-super-majorities-one-party-control-arent-unusual-at-all-these-days/
I would add that even in super majority Illinois there are many spits within the democratic party and the minority republicans as well

[corco]

Wyoming is the same way- their current governor is a Republican but most of their governors have been Democrats in recent history.

Montana also has a Democrat governor.

[Takumi]

Virginia's gubernatorial election is held a year after the presidential election, and the party that won the presidential election there has lost the gubernatiorial election since before my lifetime.
2009: McDonnell (R)
2005: Kaine (D)
2001: M. Warner (D)
1997: Gilmore (R)
1993: Allen (R)
1989: Wilder (D)
1985: Baliles (D)
1981: Robb (D)

[US71]

I noticed that although Kentucky usually votes Republican in Presidential elections, they have had mostly Democratic governors in recent history. Why is this? What other states have a split like this between two statewide-elected positions?

Note: This thread is NOT for bashing one side or the other. It's a fine line, please don't cross it.

Arkansas has a Democratic Governor, but voted Republican for President. We also have a predominantly Republican State Legislature. Gov Beebe has lowered the grocery tax twice, but Republicans keep pushing for tax increases.

[1995hoo]

I don't necessarily think there's anything odd about someone conservative voting for a Republican at the national level and for a Democrat at the state or local level if he believes in the principle that local government is better suited to provide constituent services because the local government has a better ability to assess constituent needs. Given that as a general matter the Democrats are seen as the party more interested in providing government services (which at the local county level might include things like schools, public libraries, parks, etc.; the exact nature would depend on how your state's government is set up and what they allow localities to do), I can certainly understand the idea of splitting your vote in that manner.

I tend to vote for the candidate and not the party. I think the only office for which I've never voted for a Democrat is for president, though that doesn't mean I've always voted for a Republican for president either. For just about everything else I can think of times I've voted Republican, times I've voted Democrat, and times I've voted third-party. Sometimes I decide partly in reaction to a candidate offering no platform of his own. For example, back in 1997 Jim Gilmore ran for governor on the platform of phasing out a portion of Virginia's hated personal property tax (generally called the "car tax"). People can agree or disagree as they wish on whether that was a good idea, but what I found notable was that his opponent–then—Lieutenant Governor Don Beyer, who was pretty popular on the whole–spent the campaign railing against Gilmore's "No Car Tax" slogan and never came up with a real platform of his own. I feel pretty strongly that a candidate needs to give me a reason to vote FOR him and that if he spends all his time railing against his opponent's ideas, or telling you why you shouldn't vote for his opponent, then it shows that he has no ideas of his own and can't come up with a reason why he deserves your vote.


BTW, a follow-up on Takumi's comment–Virginia law prohibits a governor from serving consecutive terms. A governor can pull a Grover Cleveland and be re-elected later, but that's extremely rare (only happened once in the 20th century–Mills Godwin served four years as a Democrat from 1966 to 1970, later switched parties and was elected again for the term from 1974 to 1978). Former governor and current US Senator Mark Warner has been suggested many times as someone who could win another term if he chose to run, but last week he said he won't run next year. Warner was governor from 2002 to 2006. Anyway, I suspect the lack of an incumbent in gubernatorial races might be one factor in why Virginia often swings the opposite way the year after a presidential election–simply because it's two new candidates every time and so it's hard to draw any connection.


For anyone who doubts that elections can matter in your day-to-day life, consider that if the Republicans hadn't taken control of Congress in 1994, the National Speed Limit would not have been repealed the following year. The Democrats were against it, but the Republicans got it through Congress as part of the highway funding bill and Bill Clinton signed it into law despite opposing the speed-limit repeal because he felt the highway funding was too important. Here in Virginia we wouldn't have gone back to 70-mph speed limits on rural highways had the Republican candidate not won the last gubernatorial election–he made that issue part of his platform (and his opponent, rural senator Creigh Deeds, didn't really address transportation at all).

[Road Hog]

I noticed that although Kentucky usually votes Republican in Presidential elections, they have had mostly Democratic governors in recent history. Why is this? What other states have a split like this between two statewide-elected positions?

Note: This thread is NOT for bashing one side or the other. It's a fine line, please don't cross it.

Arkansas has a Democratic Governor, but voted Republican for President. We also have a predominantly Republican State Legislature. Gov Beebe has lowered the grocery tax twice, but Republicans keep pushing for tax increases.

Arkansas' state house only flipped Republican with this month's election. The Democrats had done a good job juggling the districts to this point. Although in Arkansas it's hard to tell the two parties apart, most members of each are conservative.

http://www.southernstudies.org/2012/11/gops-takeover-of-arkansas-legislature-boosts-partys-control-in-the-south-updated.html

[Mdcastle]

Minnesota is rather interesting politically, we have Democrats (technically the DFL) controlling all the major positions now, but that hasn't been the case for years. The Twin Cities has a lot more middle-class, Republican suburbanites than rust belt cities , and those and the conservative farmers tend to balance out in the DFL northern mining and urban areas.

It wasn't to long ago that we elected a third party pro-wrestler as a Gov, who wasn't noticably worse than any of the carreer politicians...

[kphoger]

{long}

My personal political views tend to run more conservative at the national level and more liberal at the local level.  I guess maybe I'm not alone in that.

[vdeane]

It's also worth noting that many southern Democrats are indistinguishable from northern Republicans.

[J N Winkler]

The structure of primary elections, and their knock-on effects on candidate recruitment, can have an effect on cross-ballot party splitting in a given state.

Many states, like Kansas, have closed primaries, whose turnouts are poor except among the committed party faithful because they offer the opportunity to choose candidates for only one party.  What this translates to is de facto minority rule, especially when one party (in Kansas, the Republicans) dominates state politics so thoroughly that the primary election for that party determines which candidates prevail in the general election.

Take my state senate district (the 25th) as an example:  in the August Republican primary, Michael O'Donnell prevailed over the incumbent Jean Schodorf by 2785 votes to 1949, while in the Democratic primary Tim Snow defeated Perry Schuckman by 957 votes to 874.  In both cases the primary results ran counter to the editorial board endorsements of the Wichita Eagle, which tend to be highly influential among educated middle-class voters.  O'Donnell has aligned himself with the conservative wing of the Republican party in Kansas, which is riding high at present--indeed it was in this primary election (not the general election earlier this month) that it vanquished the moderate wing, with which it has been in a civil war for years.  The race between O'Donnell and Schodorf (one of the leading moderates) was very bitter, and sucked up more than 90% of the media attention, so there has been very little analysis of what happened on the Democratic side, but it has been suggested that Schuckman (a native Kansan who came back after several decades in the San Francisco Bay Area) got stealthed by Snow, who apparently has ties to the Occupy Wichita movement.

Because the Legislature's failure earlier this year to agree new districts resulted in Kansas getting them through federal court action, the boundaries do not reflect fine-grained political considerations.  So the Kansas Senate 25th District is very diverse in socioeconomic terms--it includes LGBTs in Riverside, very conservative lower-middle-class "striver" types in southwest Wichita, and educated professionals, successful small-business owners, and public-sector workers in northwest Wichita who, as a group, go either lavender or lilac-pink in Presidential elections.  This type of diversity can be a recipe for vote dilution since federal courts are obliged only to avoid "dilution of minority voting strength" in redistricting cases--they don't have to consider other socioeconomic characteristics, or other goals (like the one mooted in the Legislature) such as keeping Lawrence and Manhattan in the same Congressional district to form an "universities seat."

O'Donnell was very widely disliked and coverage in the runup to the general election focused on his failure to pay property taxes on a house he rents from his father's Baptist church.  In Kansas a property is tax-exempt if it is occupied by a person discharging ecclesiastical duties, and O'Donnell claimed at various times that he qualified for this exemption since he did unpaid handyman work at the church.  The county assessor's office does not agree and has sent him a bill for unpaid back taxes.  His story, which shifts from time to time, fits in with a past history of manipulating residency in order to put himself into the correct district for a race he sees as winnable.  His hypocrisy on the property tax issue is considered especially glaring since it is widely suspected that if and when Governor Brownback's tax cuts (which O'Donnell supports) lead the state into deep deficits, property taxes will have to be increased to make up the difference.  Meanwhile, a few days before the election, it was revealed that Snow, who was already seen at best as a "diamond in the rough" since he is taking college classes while on unemployment, is also a recovering alcoholic with a string of unpaid debt judgments in connection with smoke shops he used to run in small-town east-central Kansas.

So, bottom line, in the general election O'Donnell won over Snow by a paper-thin margin--9117 votes to 8797, a 2% margin in an election where the Libertarian no-hoper got 7% of the vote, double the usual third-party percentage of 3%.

Kansas has a population of 2.871 million, so under the rule of one person one vote, each Kansas Senate district has a population of 71,700.  For the 71,000-plus souls living in Senate District 25, O'Donnell was effectively chosen by a hyperminority of 4,734 people voting in the Republican primary, not by the 19,469 people who voted in the general election.  If the voters' disgust with O'Donnell's tax evasion had risen to a level sufficient to let Snow in, he would have been chosen by an even smaller hyperminority of 1,831--as matters stand he benefited from a quite significant swing compared to registered party affiliations statewide.

What this means is that closed primaries have the ability to empower committed extremists.  In the most likely counterfactual case, with an open-primary law allowing people to vote in the primaries of multiple parties regardless of their registered party affiliation, the Volvo Republicans in northwest Wichita would have been able to vote for Schuckman to keep out Snow, while Democrats (who in Kansas have a roughly 2:1 disadvantage in registrations compared to the Republicans) would probably have had the votes to keep out O'Donnell since the total votes cast in the low-turnout Democratic primary is roughly double O'Donnell's edge over Schodorf in the Republican primary.  This means the likeliest general-election matchup would have been between Schodorf and Schuckman, both of whom were much closer to the political center than the candidates that defeated them in the primary.

Even if open primaries had resulted in a general-election matchup between O'Donnell and Snow, both candidates would have had to play to the center.  This would have given the voters a better idea of what they might do if actually elected because, under our tripartite system of divided government, centrists tend to be better positioned to pursue policy goals through compromise.

[Brandon]

It's also worth noting that many southern Democrats are indistinguishable from northern Republicans.

And that's just inside Illinois. 

Seriously though, the main split in this state is Chicago and Not-Chicago.  That split crosses the R vs. D divide.  Downstate Dems are as fond of Chicago Dems as downstate Republicans are.  And by downstate, the split often occurs as Cook, DuPage, and Lake Counties vs. the rest of us.

[corco]

Is Kane still considered downstate at this point?

[kphoger]

It's also worth noting that many southern Democrats are indistinguishable from northern Republicans.

You can usually tell the difference by their haircuts.  That's how I do it.

[Brandon]

Is Kane still considered downstate at this point?

Kane is a part of Chicagoland, but the voting patterns of Kane (as for McHenry and Will) tend to be more in line with the adjacent areas downstate (Kendall, DeKalb, Boone, Kankakee, Grundy).  There's a lot of anti-Chicago sentiment in McHenry, Kane, and Will Counties.  Probably more so in McHenry and Will than Kane though.

[3467]

Generally what Brandon says ....but I would say far southern dems are more conservative than even the more recent shift of suburban republicans to the right. On election night the southern IL dems did well and suburban repubs didnt
Kane went Obama so did the western downstate counties. Will and Mc Henery went Romney
Also most sub and downstate dems declared anti Chicago unity on a complicated illinois issue known as the pension cost shift
i would also agree with Brandon on the anti-Chicago sentiment in those counties. I would say its worse than in some of the downstate counties