"Ticket-Splitting Voters Are Disappearing--Which Makes Them Even More Valuable"

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.thebulwark.com/ticket-splitting-voters-are-disappearing-which-makes-them-even-more-valuable/

On November 4, 2020, Rep. Collin Peterson—the maverick, conservative Democrat from western Minnesota—was nowhere to be found for a post-election interview. In and of itself, this wasn’t unusual, Peterson has never been overly friendly with the media. He has run his campaigns his own way, by attending hundreds of local events and gatherings across the district. For 30 years, this approach had worked like a charm, as Peterson kept winning in a district that kept shifting further and farther to the right. In 2016 he won his race by 5 points even as Hillary Clinton lost the district by 31 points.

But Peterson did release a post-election statement. Gone was the traditional victory lap he would take every two years and in its place was simple thank-you to the members of the district for the memories, along with a lament regarding the outside money poured into his election and the ruby-red presidential lean of the district becoming “too much to overcome,” at long last.

For the first time in 30 years, Collin Peterson had lost.

Partisan polarization is at an all-time high. As both parties drift further apart ideologically, it has rapidly become the single best predictor of how Americans stand on many issues. A recent Pew Research Center study polled stances on 30 diverse ideological issues and showed the average partisan gap was 39 points. For comparison, the average racial gap was 17 points and the average gender gap was 6 points.

As this partisan issue gap widens, the number of Americans willing to cross party lines and vote for different parties on the same ballot (e.g. a Republican for Congress and a Democrat for president) declines because they find the other party increasingly inhospitable to views that they hold deeply important.

*snip*