Introduction

Across the country, in fifty state capitals, 7,383 state legislators pass laws and debate policy that affects the residents of their states.¹ With few exceptions, state legislators are either Democrats or Republicans, and such partisan labels at the state level represent similar divisions in ideology at the federal level. A Democratic state legislator from Nevada has much more in common with one from New Jersey than she does with the Republican sitting next to her in the Nevada Capitol. Gone are the old lines of division other than party that might separate a state legislator, such as regional or demographic splits. Indeed, Tip O’Neill’s famous maxim that “all politics is local” has certainly fallen flat in recent years.

Daniel Hopkins, in his book The Increasingly United States, seeks to explain why. Firstly, voters are “engaged with and knowledgeable about national politics to the exclusion of state or local politics.” That is, national issues dominate local ones with the rise of the 24-hour TV network and the demise of the local newspaper – neither fixing potholes nor building parks are sexy topics that prompt online outrage or spirited debate around the dinner table. Secondly, “voters’ choices in state and local races echo those in national races;” that is, they pick candidates of the same party up and down the ballot over the years. Hopkins argues that this is “the product of a party and interest-group constellation that is funded nationally and that increasingly offers voters similar choices in all parts of the country.”²

It is this secondary tenet, that of voters becoming more partisan in casting their ballot, to which I draw attention. In particular, there has been an increasing connection between the presidential race and state legislative elections. For example, Steven Rogers finds that presidential popularity is directly correlated with the likelihood that members of the President’s party will get challengers in their elections, and indeed the percentage of the vote those challengers achieve.³

Just looking at the 2017 & 2018 midterm results, we can see this fact bearing out in full force. Of the six state legislative chambers that flipped to the Democrats, all were in states that Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Furthermore, all seven chambers where Democrats established new supermajorities were in Clinton states.⁴

To explore this phenomenon of nationalized voting behavior, I acquired a dataset of state legislative elections in 2017 / 2018, and the results of the Presidential race in their districts in 2016. The specifics of the construction of this data can be found in the Methodology tab.

To that end, in 2017 and 2018, 61% of state legislative candidates ran between 5% behind and 5% ahead of the margin of their Presidential counterparts, and a full 87% ran between 10% behind and 10% ahead. 2018 was a high-water mark for this type of polarization, as the work of Zingher and Richman show.⁵

But lurking within that 87% number is an implicit 13% – what happened with these other candidates? How did they manage to do so well or so poorly in comparison to their Presidential standard bearers? Is it the work of individual popularity or scandal? Delays in geographic or partisan realignments? Indeed, they are the Exceptions to the rule.

Works Cited & Notes

¹ National Council of State Legislatures: Number of Legislators

² Hopkins, Daniel J. The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized. Chicago Studies in American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018, pg. 3

³ Rogers, Steven. “National forces in state legislative elections.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 667, no. 1 (2016): pg. 220

⁴ Ballotpedia, 2018 State Legislative Elections.

⁵ Zingher, Joshua N., and Jesse Richman. “Polarization and the nationalization of state legislative elections.” American Politics Research 47, no. 5 (2019): 1036-1054.