States with split politics

[kphoger]

gubernatorial (who the hell came up with that word?)

'Governor' came to the English language by way of French (governeor).  'Gubernatorial' came directly from Latin (gubernator) without bothering to stop in France along the way.

[vdeane]

Term limits are supposed to get rid of career politicians.  In fact, I would not be opposed to replacing elections with a random draft, like the military one.

This is a terrible analogy, so I apologize up front. A Career Politician is like a wife you have to live with. A term-limited politician is like a prostitute with one eye on the clock.

On a couple occasions, a legislator thought he could express his independence and cut a deal with the other side. Guess what, the GOP laid down the pimp-hand and ran a successful recall election in his district.

I'd rather have a Career Politician, with name recognition and some popular support, who can give the finger to the party establishment if he wants to. Term Limits were put in place to get rid of Willie Brown, but they ended up weakening the minority Republicans most of all.

I'd say a career politician is more like living with someone who wants to kill you.  I'd also get rid of political parties.  IMO they do nothing but harm our country for their own self interests.

[hbelkins]

So it would be better to have someone with no aptitude, desire, or experience to hold a position?

I have the aptitude and desire to hold high position. In order to get the experience, I have to abandon my morals. So it goes.

I would rather be Karl Rove than George W. Bush. Or to keep it bipartisan, I'd rather be David Axelrod than Barack Obama. I have no desire to ever hold elective office, even though I've been encouraged to run for everything from city council (when I lived in a city) to state representative. I would not want the public anal exam that goes along with being a candidate for office. For right or wrong, your private life gets picked apart by people looking for anything they can use against you.

I'd much rather be a behind-the-scenes adviser (or are they back to spelling it advisor?) to a high-ranking elected official than the official him/herself.

And I guess I'm seeing one possible answer to the original question: Parties are a name, but whereas a Presidential election is national, a senatorial or gubernatorial (who the hell came up with that word?) election is statewide, and state politics under the same name as the national party can vary toward the sentiment of the state overall.

It's very much true in Kentucky.

[J N Winkler]

I'd say a career politician is more like living with someone who wants to kill you.

Nope--if you are dead, you can't vote for them.  They have a mercenary interest in your vote.

I'd also get rid of political parties.  IMO they do nothing but harm our country for their own self interest.

When I was your age (assuming the age on your profile is your true age), I used to feel similarly.  I thought all elections should be nonpartisan and that all voting, both by the ordinary citizen in the voting booth and by the elected representative in the legislature, should be by conscience alone.  But life experience and a decade's study as an economic historian (which entails learning about institutional economics) has forced me to abandon this view.  Party formation is all about reducing the costs of transacting political business.  Political parties simplify decision-making for the voter because party affiliation relieves the voter from having to interrogate each candidate as to his stand on every single issue.  Within the legislative process, they make it easier to organize collective action on public policy issues by creating an expectation that members of the party will vote the party's position on a given issue out of loyalty.  This is why political parties are sometimes described as an "emergent property" of political systems and also why it is difficult to prevent the formation of parties without quite significant repressive measures.

You might also want to consider Arrow's impossibility theorem and its implications for what the political system can do, regardless of whether parties exist or not.  The empirical observation is that most voting systems navigate around Arrow's impossibility theorem by relaxing independence of irrelevant alternatives.  A practical example of what this means:  Suppose you strongly support highway funding, and are strongly pro-choice on the abortion issue.  Suppose Candidate A is pro-choice but wants to cut highway funding, while Candidate B strongly supports highway funding but is anti-abortion, and the political system does not permit additional candidates.  This means that you have to choose on the basis of one issue or the other and accept a downside regardless of which choice you make--either a cut in highway funding or the possibility of further abortion restrictions.  This is something that happens regardless of whether a party is involved.