JFK’s tiny tide meant that those states whose voting deviated only narrowly from the national voting mimicked Kennedy’s narrow 50-state win, and thus were close in absolute terms as well.
Figure 1.1 shows the number of electoral votes in states that voted close to the national popular vote in a given election from 1896 through 2012. As should be clear from figure 1.1, the number of electoral votes in states that vote near the national average has been dropping over the last several decades.
FIGURE 1.1. Number of electoral votes in states with presidential deviations less than five in presidential elections, 1896–2012
The figure shows how the number of states—and the number of electoral votes—that reside near the nation’s political middle was about as low in the mid-2010s as it was a century earlier. The number dipped to very low levels in the first part of the 20th century. They steadily rose throughout the dozen years of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, staying generally high through the very close election of 1976, before steadily declining over the past four decades.
That suggests a sorting of the states into opposing camps with near-impregnable walls, making most states effectively uncompetitive in tight national elections. This dovetails with other trends in American politics and culture.
SORTED AMERICA
Bill Bishop argued in The Big Sort that the United States is becoming increasingly clustered, with like-minded people choosing to live closer together. This sorting, Bishop argues, is reflected in our politics: “As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogenous groups.”21
A yawning urban/rural split has emerged in the nation’s politics, with Democrats performing well in big urban counties while Republicans win much of what remains. In 2012, Obama captured 46 of the nation’s 50 most populous counties. Back in 1976, Carter won just 27 of these counties against Ford.
Obama won only 7 percent of counties that are part of Appalachia, the country’s sparsely populated and historically economically depressed region that is defined by the federal Appalachian Regional Commission.22 In his 1976 victory, Carter won about 70 percent of these counties; in 1996, Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton won nearly half of them. Both of these candidates, as southerners, had special appeal to this culturally southern-leaning region, but the disparity in performance in such a short amount of time remains striking.
In the 2012 election, roughly four-fifths of nonwhite voters, who made up close to 30 percent of the national electorate, voted for Obama, while about three-fifths of white voters, making up about 70 percent of the voters, picked Romney.23 As the country becomes more diverse, it’s not impossible to imagine a scenario where voting becomes even more polarized by race.
Others have noted the increasing political polarization of the American public, such as Alan Abramowitz, who coined along with his colleague Steven Webster the term “negative partisanship,” which describes how voters’ increasingly hostile perceptions of the opposing political party inform their voting. “This has led to sharp increases in party loyalty and straight ticket voting across all categories of party identification,” they write, “and to growing consistency between the results of presidential elections and the results of House and Senate elections.”24
In 1900, just 3.4 percent of US House districts featured split results—that is, only a relative handful of districts supported a different party for president and for US representative. Such low percentages remained common throughout the first half of the 20th century: on average, only 12 percent of districts featured split results in the presidential elections held during this period. (Not all district results are available from this time period, but there’s little reason to think that the missing data would change the results much.)
But throughout the second half of the century and into this century, it was common for congressional districts to support candidates from different parties for president and for the US House. From 1952 to 2008, an average of 28 percent of House districts split their presidential and congressional ballots. However, the number of split districts has been dropping over time, bottoming out at only 26 of 435 districts (6 percent) in 2012.25
Granted, blowout elections will naturally produce more split districts. The two elections with the highest number of split district results were 1972 and 1984, when Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan each carried 49 of 50 states in smashing reelections. Also, both parties will draw favorable districts for themselves whenever possible, a process known as gerrymandering. This incentivizes the majority party in a state to draw the minority party’s voters into a small number of districts the majority party cannot win, while drawing a larger number of safe districts for themselves.
But the trend over time is a good measure of polarization—and also of the political trajectory of the South, which throughout the second half of the 20th century often elected Democrats to the House while backing Republicans for president. Indeed, the less polarized second half of the last decade doesn’t exactly have noble roots. Brendan Nyhan has argued that “the less polarized politics of the mid-20th century were driven almost entirely by the issue of race, which created a bloc of conservative southern Democrats who acted as a virtual third party for much of this time.”26
Those conservative Democrats in the South would become Republicans: the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina) is now largely a one-party preserve. The same can be said of several other southern states, such as Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas.
The Republican Party used to have a bloc of northeastern liberals/moderates, known as “Rockefeller Republicans” in tribute to the moderate governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. One of the last examples of these political anachronisms was Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, who lost to a Democrat in the midterm wave of 2006. Nearly a decade later, in 2015, Chafee was not only a Democrat—he was running (hopelessly) for the Democratic presidential nomination before dropping out of the race after a single debate.
The reason to bring all this up is simple: in a divided political world where so few voters and states can be reached, the few states that are near the nation’s political center become even more valuable. When many states are near the average national voting—as was the case in 1960 and 1976, for instance—a truly national electoral strategy is sensible. But when few are, as has been the case in recent elections, much of the country can and should be ignored by any sane presidential campaign.
THE NARROW ELECTORAL BATTLEFIELD
Nowadays, a Nixonian 50-state pledge would be ridiculous. According to an analysis from the Center for Voting and Democracy, the 2012 presidential candidates—President Obama and running mate Joe Biden along with Mitt Romney and running mate Paul Ryan—held public events in only 12 states after the Democratic National Convention, all of which would deviate less than five points from the national average.27 Both parties had an excellent grasp of what the closest states were. If anything, noting that the candidates visited a dozen states makes the number of truly competitive states seem artificially high: the listing includes only one visit apiece in Michigan and Minnesota, and five or fewer in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The remaining eight states enjoyed—endured?—243 visits from the presidential tickets. Nearly a third of those were in Ohio, whose 73 visits were more than double the total of any other
